Valis (22 page)

The newspapers and TV carried an account of Mother Goose's daughter's death. Naturally, since Eric Lampton was a rock star, the implication was made that sinister forces had been at work, probably having to do with neglect or drugs or weird stuff generally. Mini's face was shown, and then some clips from the film
Valis
in which the fortress-like mixer appeared.

Two or three days later, everyone had forgotten about it. Other horrors occupied the TV screen. Other tragedies took place. As always. A liquor store in West L.A. got robbed and the clerk shot. An old man died at a substandard nursing home. Three cars on the San Diego Freeway collided with a lumber truck which had caught on fire and stalled.

The world continued as it always had.

I began to think about death. Not Sophia Lampton's death but death in general and then, by degrees, my own death.

Actually, I didn't think about it. Horselover Fat did.

One night, as he sat in my living room in my easy chair, a glass of cognac in his hand, he said meditatively, "All it proved was what we knew anyhow; her death, I mean."

"And what did we know?" I said.

"That they were nuts."

I said, "The parents were nuts. But not Sophia."

"If she had been Zebra," Fat said, "she would have had foreknowledge of Mini's screw-up with the laser equipment. She could have averted it."

"Sure," I said.

"It's true," Fat said. "She would have had the knowledge and in addition
--
" He pointed at me. Triumph lay in his voice; bold triumph. "She would have had the power to avert it. Right? If she could overthrow Ferris F. Fremount
--
"

"Drop it," I said.

"All that was involved from the start," Fat said quietly, "was advanced laser technology. Mini found a way to transmit information by laser beam, using human brains as transducers without the need for an electronic interface. The Russians can do the same thing. Microwaves can be used as well. In March 1974 I must have intercepted one of Mini's transmissions by accident; it irradiated me. That's why my blood pressure went up so high, and the animals died of cancer.
That's what's killing Mini; the radiation produced by his own laser experimentations."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Fat said, "I'm sorry. Will you be okay?"

"Sure," I said.

"After all," Fat said, "I never really got a chance to talk to her, not to the extent that the rest of you did; I wasn't there that second time, when she gave us -- the Society -- our commission."

And now, I wondered, what about our commission?

"Fat," I said, "you're not going to try to knock yourself off again, are you? Because of her death?"

"No," Fat said.

I didn't believe him. I could tell; I knew him, better than he knew himself. Gloria's death, Beth abandoning him, Sherri dying -- all that had saved him after Sherri died was his decision to go in search of the "fifth Savior," and now that hope had perished. What did he have left?

Fat had tried everything, and everything had failed.

"Maybe you should start seeing Maurice again," I said.

"He'll say, 'And I mean it.'" We both laughed. "'I want you to list the ten things you want most to do in all the world; I want you to think about it and write them down, and I mean it!'"

I said, "What do you want to do?" And I meant it.

"Find her," Fat said.

"Who?" I said.

"I don't know," Fat said. The one that died. The one that I will never see again."

There're a lot of them in that category, I said to myself. Sorry, Fat; your answer is too vague.

"I should go over to World-Wide Travel," Fat said, half to himself, "and talk to the lady there some more. About India. I have a feeling India is the place."

"Place for what?"

"Where he'll be," Fat said.

I did not respond; there was no point to it. Fat's madness had returned.

"He's somewhere," Fat said. "I know he is, right now; somewhere in the world. Zebra told me. 'St. Sophia is going to be born again; she wasn't
--
'"

"You want me to tell you the truth?" I interrupted.

Fat blinked. "Sure, Phil."

In a harsh voice, I said, "There is no Savior. St. Sophia will not be born again, the Buddha is not in the park, the Head Apollo is not about to return. Got it?"

Silence.

"The fifth Savior
--
" Fat began timidly.

"Forget it," I said. "You're psychotic, Fat. You're as crazy as Eric and Linda Lampton. You're as crazy as Brent Mini. You've been crazy for eight years, since Gloria tossed herself off the Synanon Building and made herself into a scrambled egg sandwich. Give up and forget. Okay? Will you do me that one favor? Will you do
all
of us that one favor?"

Fat said finally, in a low voice, "Then you agree with Kevin."

"Yes," I said. "I agree with Kevin."

"Then why should I keep on going?" Fat said quietly.

"I don't know," I said. "And I don't really care. It's your life and your affair, not mine."

"Zebra wouldn't have lied to me," Fat said.

"There is no 'Zebra,'" I said. "It's yourself. Don't you recognize your own self? It's you and only you, projecting your unanswered wishes out, unfulfilled desires left over after Gloria did herself in. You couldn't fill the vacuum with reality so you filled it with fantasy; it was psychological compensation for a fruitless, wasted, empty, pain-filled life and I don't see why you don't finally now fucking give up; you're
like Kevin's cat: you're stupid. That is the beginning and the end of it. Okay?"

"You rob me of hope."

"I rob you of nothing because there is nothing."

"Is all this so? You think so? Really?"

I said, "I know so."

"You don't think I should look for him?"

"Where the hell are you going to look? You have no idea, no idea in the world, where he might be. He could be in Ireland. He could be in Mexico City. He could be in Anaheim at Disneyland; yeah -- maybe he's working at Disneyland, pushing a broom. How are you going to recognize him? We all thought Sophia was the Savior; we believed in that until the day she died. She
talked
like the Savior. We had all the evidence; we had all the signs. We had the flick
Valis.
We had the two-word cypher. We had the Lamptons and Mini. Their story fit your story; everything fit. And now there's another dead girl in another box in the ground -- that makes three in all. Three people who died for nothing. You believed it, I believed it, David believed it, Kevin believed it, the Lamptons believed it; Mini in particular believed it, enough to accidentally kill her. So now it ends. It never should have begun -- goddam Kevin for seeing that film! Go out and kill yourself. The hell with it."

"I still might
--
"

"You won't," I said. "Yon won't find him. I know. Let me put it to you in a simple way so you can grasp it. You thought the Savior would bring Gloria back -- right? He, she, didn't; now she's dead, too. Instead of
--
" I gave up.

"Then the true name for religion," Fat said, "is death."

"The secret name," I agreed. "You got it. Jesus died; Asklepios died -- they killed Mani worse than they killed Jesus, but nobody even cares; nobody even remembers. They killed the Catharists in southern France by the tens of thousands. In the Thirty Years War, hundreds of thousands of people died, Protestants and Catholics -- mutual slaughter. Death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love --
death.
Kevin is right about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin:
'Why did my cat die?' Answer: 'Damned if I know.' There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us
down half-way across that we never saw. Go ask Kevin. 'Your cat was stupid.' Who made the cat? Why did he make the cat stupid? Did the cat learn by being killed, and if so, what did he learn? Did Sherri learn anything from dying of cancer? Did Gloria learn anything
--
"

"Okay, enough," Fat said.

"Kevin is right," I said. "Go out and get laid."

"By who? They're all dead."

I said, "There're more. Still alive. Lay one of them before she dies or you die or somebody dies, some person or animal. You said it yourself: the universe is irrational because the mind behind it is irrational. You are irrational and you know it.
I
am. We all are and we know it, on some level. I'd write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human beings could be as irrational as we are, as we've acted."

"They would now," Fat said, "after Jim Jones and the nine hundred people at Jonestown."

"Go away, Fat," I said. "Go to South America. Go back up to Sonoma and apply for residence at the Lamptons' commune, unless they've given up, which I doubt. Madness has its own dynamism; it just goes on." Getting to my feet I walked over and stuck my hand against his chest. "The girl is dead, Gloria is dead; nothing will restore her."

"Sometimes I dream
--
"

"I'll put that on your gravestone."

After he had obtained his passport, Fat left the United States and flew by Icelandic Airlines to Luxembourg, which is the cheapest way to go. We got a postcard from him mailed at his stop-over in Iceland, and then, a month later, a letter from Metz, France. Metz lies on the border to Luxembourg; I looked it up on the map.

In Metz -- which he liked, as a scenic place -- he met a girl and enjoyed a wonderful time until she took him for half of the money he'd brought with him. He sent us a photograph of her; she is very pretty, reminding me a little of Linda Ronstadt, with the same shape face and haircut. It was the last picture he sent us, because the girl stole his camera as well. She worked at a bookstore. Fat never told us whether he got to go to bed with her.

From Metz he crossed over into West Germany, where the American dollar is worth nothing. He already read and spoke
a little German so he had a relatively easy time there. But his letters became less frequent and finally stopped completely.

"If he'd have made it with the French girl," Kevin said, "he'd have recovered."

"For all we know he did," David said,

Kevin said, "If he'd made it with her he'd be back here sane. He's not, so he didn't."

A year passed. One day I got a mailgram from him; Fat had flown back to the United States, to New York. He knows people there. He would be arriving in California, he said, when he got over his mono; in Europe he had been hit by mono.

"But did he find the Savior?" Kevin said. The mailgram didn't say. "It would say if he had," Kevin said. "It's like with that French girl; we'd have heard."

"At least he isn't dead," David said.

Kevin said, "It depends on how you define 'dead.'"

Meanwhile I had been doing fine; my books sold well, now -- I had more money put away than I knew what to do with. In fact we were all doing well. David ran a tobacco shop at the city shopping mall, one of the most elegant malls in Orange County; Kevin's new girlfriend treated him and us gently and with tact, putting up with our gallows sense of humor, especially Kevin's. We had told her all about Fat and his quest -- and the French girl fleecing him right down to his Pentax camera. She looked forward to meeting him and we looked forward to his return: stories and pictures and maybe presents! we said to ourselves.

And then we received a second mailgram. This time from Portland, Oregon. It read:

KING FELIX

Nothing more. Just those two startling words. Well? I thought. Did he? Is that what he's telling us? Does the Rhipidon Society reconvene in plenary session after all this time?

It hardly mattered to us. Collectively and individually we barely remembered. It was a part of our lives we preferred to forget. Too much pain; too many hopes down the tube.

When Fat arrived in LAX, which is the designation for the Los Angeles Airport, the four of us met him: me, Kevin,
David and Kevin's foxy girl friend Ginger, a tail girl with blonde hair braided and with bits of red ribbon in the braids, a colorful lady who liked to drive miles and miles late at night to drink Irish coffee at some out-of-the-way Irish bar.

With all the rest of the people in the world we milled around and conversed, and then all at once, unexpectedly, there came Horselover Fat striding toward us in the midst of the gang of other passengers. Grinning, carrying a briefcase; our friend back home. He wore a suit and tie, a good-looking East Coast suit, fashionable in the extreme. It shocked us to see him so well-dressed; we had anticipated, I guess, some emaciated hollow-eyed remnant scarcely able to hobble down the corridor.

After we'd hugged him and introduced him to Ginger we asked him how he'd been.

"Not bad," he said.

We ate at the restaurant at a top-of-the-line nearby hotel. Not much talk took place, for some reason. Fat seemed withdrawn, but not actually depressed. Tired, I decided. He had traveled a long way; it was inscribed on his face. Those things show up; they leave their mark.

"What's in the briefcase?" I said when our after-dinner coffee came.

Pushing aside the dishes before him, Fat laid down the briefcase and unsnapped it; it wasn't key-locked. In it he had manila folders, one of which he lifted out after sorting among them; they bore numbers. He examined it a last time to be sure he had the right one and then he handed it to me.

"Look in it," he said, smiling slightly, as you do when you have given someone a present which you know will please him and he is unwrapping it before your eyes.

I opened it. In the folder I found four 8 X 10 glossy photos, obviously professionally done; they looked like the kind of stills that the publicity departments of movie studios put out.

The photos showed a Greek vase, on it a painting of a male figure who we recognized as Hermes.

Twined around the vase the double helix confronted us, done in red glaze against a black background. The DNA molecule. There could be no mistake.

"Twenty-three or -four hundred years ago," Fat said. "Not the picture but the
krater,
the pottery."