Valis (5 page)

"You of all people," the void communicated. "Out of everyone, it is you I love the most."

The void had been waiting to be reunited with Horselover Fat, of all the humans who had ever existed. Like its extension into space, the love in the void lay boundless; it and its love floated forever. Fat had never been so happy in all his life.

The psych tech walked up to him and said, "We are holding you for fourteen days."

"I can't go home?" Fat said.

"No, we feel you need treatment. You're not ready to go home yet."

"Read me my rights," Fat said, feeling numb and afraid.

"We can hold you fourteen days without a court hearing. After that with your approval we can, if we feel it's necessary, hold you another ninety days."

Fat knew that if he said anything, anything at all, they would hold him the ninety days. So he said nothing. When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

Being crazy and getting caught at it, out in the open, turns out to be a way to wind up in jail. Fat now knew this. Besides having a county drunk tank, the County of Orange had a county lunatic tank. He was in it
.
He could stay in it for a long time. Meanwhile, back at home, Beth undoubtedly was taking everything she wanted from their house to the apartment she had rented -- she had refused to tell him where the apartment was; she wouldn't even tell him the city.

Actually, although Fat didn't know it at the time, due to his own folly he had allowed a payment on his house to lapse, as well as on his car; he had not paid the electric bill nor the phone bill. Beth, distraught over Fat's mental and physical state, could not be expected to take on the crushing problems Fat had created. So when Fat got out of the hospital and returned home he found a notice of foreclosure, his car gone, the refrigerator leaking water, and when he tried to phone for help the phone was dreadfully silent. This had the effect of wiping out what little morale he had left, and he knew it was all his own fault. It was his karma.

Right now, Fat did not know these things. All he knew was that he had been thrown in the lock-up for a minimum of two weeks. Also, he had found out one other thing, from the other patients. The County of Orange would bill him for his stay in the lock-up. As a matter of fact his total bill, including that portion covering his time in the cardiac intensive care ward, came to over two thousand dollars. Fat had gone to the county hospital in the first place because he didn't have the money to be taken to a private hospital. So now he had learned something else about being crazy: not
only does it get you locked up, but it costs you a lot of money. They can bill you for being crazy and if you don't pay or can't pay they can sue you, and if a court judgment is issued against you and you fail to comply, they can lock you up again, as being in contempt of court.

When you consider that Fat's original suicide attempt had emanated out of a deep despair, the magic of his present situation, the glamor, somehow had departed. Beside him on the plastic and chrome couch the huge old lady continued to throw up her medication in the plastic basin provided by the hospital for such matters. The psych tech had taken hold of Fat by the arm to lead him to the ward where he would be confined during the two weeks ahead. They called it the North Ward. Unprotestingly, Fat accompanied the psych tech out of the receiving ward, across the hall and into the North Ward, where once again the door got locked behind him.

Fuck, Fat said to himself.

The psych tech escorted Fat to his room -- which had two beds in it instead of six cots -- and then took Fat to a small room to get a questionaire filled out. "This'll only take a few minutes," the psych tech said.

In the small room stood a girl, a Mexican girl, heavy-set, with rough, dark skin and huge eyes, dark and peaceful eyes, eyes like pools of fire; Fat stopped dead in his tracks as he saw the girl's flaming, peaceful huge eyes. The girl held a magazine open on top of a TV set; she displayed a crude drawing printed on the page: a picture of the Peaceful Kingdom. The magazine, Fat realized, was the
Watchtower.
The girl, smiling at him, was a Jehovah's Witness.

The girl said in a gentle and moderated voice, to Fat and not to the psych tech, "Our Lord God has prepared for us a place to live where there will be no pain and no fear and see? the animals lie happily together, the lion and the lamb, as we shall be, all of us, friends who love one another, without suffering or death, forever and ever with our Lord Jehovah who loves us and will never abandon us, whatever we do."

"Debbie, please leave the lounge," the psych tech said.

Still smiling at Fat, the girl pointed to a cow and a lamb in the crude drawing. "All beasts, all men, all living creatures great and small will bask in the warmth of Jehovah's love, when the Kingdom arrives. You think it will be a long time, but Christ Jesus is with us today." Then, closing up the magazine, the girl, still smiling but now silent, left the room.

"Sorry about that," the psych tech said to Fat.

"Gosh," Fat said, amazed.

"Didshe upset you? I'm sorry about that. She's not supposed to have that literature; somebody must have smuggled it in to her."

Fat said, "I'll be okay." He realized it; it dazed him.

"Let's get this information down," the psych tech said, seating himself with his clipboard and pen. "The date of your birth."

You fool, Fat thought. You fucking fool. God is here in your goddam mental hospital and you don't know it; you see it but you don't know it. You have been invaded and you don't even know it

He felt joy.

He remembered entry #9 from his exegesis.
He lived a long time ago but he is still alive.
He is still alive, Fat thought. After all that's happened. After the pills, after the slashed wrist, after the car exhaust. After being locked up. He is still alive.

After a few days, the patient he liked best in the ward was Doug, a large, young, deteriorated hebephrenic who never put on street clothing but simply wore a hospital gown open at the back. The women in the ward washed, cut and brushed Doug's hair because he lacked the skills to do those things himself. Doug did not take his situation seriously, except when they all got wakened up for breakfast. Every day Doug greeted Fat with terror.

"The TV lounge has devils in it," Doug always said, every morning. "I'm afraid to go in there. Can you feel it? I feel it even walking past it."

When they all made out their lunch-orders Doug wrote:

SWILL

"I'm ordering swill," he told Fat. Fat said, "I'm ordering dirt."

In the central office, which had glass walls and a locked
door, the staff watched the patients and made notations. In Fat's case it got noted down that when the patients played cards (which took up half their time, since no therapy existed) Fat never joined in. The other patients played poker and blackjack, while Fat sat off by himself reading.

"Why don't you play cards?" Penny, a psych tech, asked him.

"Poker and blackjack are not card games but money games," Fat said, lowering his book. "Since we're not allowed to have any money on us, there's no point in playing."

"I think you should play cards," Penny said.

Fat knew that he had been ordered to play cards, so he and Debbie played kids' card games like "Fish." They played "Fish" for hours. The staff watched from their glass office and noted down what they saw.

One of the women had managed to retain possession of her Bible. For the thirty-five patients it was the only Bible. Debbie was not allowed to look at it. However, at one turn in the corridor -- they were locked out of their rooms during the day, so that they could not lie down and sleep -- the staff couldn't see what was happening. Fat sometimes turned their copy of the Bible, their communal copy, over to Debbie for a fast look at one of the psalms. The staff knew what they were doing and detested them for it, but by the time a tech got out of the office and down the corridor, Debbie had strolled on.

Mental inmates always move at one speed and one speed only. But some always move slowly and some always run. Debbie, being wide and solid, sailed along slowly, as did Doug. Fat, who always walked with Doug, matched his pace to his. Together they circled around and around the corridor, conversing. Conversations in mental hospitals resemble conversations in bus stations, because in a Greyhound Bus Station everyone is waiting, and in a mental hospital -- especially a county lock-up mental hospital -- everyone is waiting. They wait to get out.

Not much goes on in a mental ward, contrary to what mythic novels relate. Patients do not really overpower the staff, and the staff does not really murder the patients. Mostly people read or watch TV or just sit smoking or try to lie down on a couch and sleep, or drink coffee or play cards or walk, and three times a day trays of food are served. The
passage of time isdesignated by the arrival of the food carts. At night visitors show up and they always smile. Patients in a mental hospital can never figure out why people from the outside smile. To me, it remains a mystery to this day.

Medication, which is always referred to as "meds," gets doled out at irregular intervals, from tiny paper cups. Everyone is given Thorazine plus something else. They do not tell you what you are getting and they watch to make sure you swallow the pills. Sometimes the meds nurses fuck up and bring the same tray of medication around twice. The patients always point out that they just took their meds ten minutes ago and the nurses give them the meds again anyhow. The mistake is never discovered until the end of the day, and the staff refuses to talk about it to the patients, all of whom now have twice as much Thorazine in their systems as they are supposed to have.

I have never met a mental patient, even the paranoid ones, who believed that double-dosing was a tactic to oversedate the ward deliberately. It is patently obvious that the nurses are dumb. The nurses have enough trouble figuring out which patient is which, and finding each patient's little paper cup. This is because a ward population constantly changes; new people arrive; old people get discharged. The real danger in a mental ward is that someone spaced out on PCP*
(
* Also known as Angel Dust.
)
will be admitted by mistake. The policy of many mental hospital is to refuse PCP users and force the armed police to process them. The armed police constantly try to force the PCP users onto the unarmed mental hospital patients and staffs. Nobody wants to deal with a PCP user, for good reasons. The newspapers constantly relate how a PCP freak, locked up in a ward somewhere, bit off another person's nose or tore out his own eyes.

Fat was spared this. He did not even know such horrors existed. This came about through the wise planning of OCMC, which made sure that no PCP-head wound up in the North Ward. In point of fact, Fat owed his life to OCMC (as well as two thousand dollars), although his mind remained too fried for him to appreciate this.

When Beth read the itemized bill from OCMC, she could
not believe the number of things they had done for her husband to keep him alive; the list ran to five pages. It even included oxygen. Fat did not know it, but the nurses at the intensive cardiac care ward believed that he would die. They monitored him constantly. Every now and then, in the intensive cardiac care ward, an emergency warning siren sounded. It meant someone had lost vital signs. Fat, lying in his bed attached as he was to the video screen, felt as if he had been placed next to a switching yard for railroad trains; life support mechanisms constantly sounded their various noises.

It is characteristic of the mentally ill to hate those who help them and love those who connive against them. Fat still loved Beth and he detested OCMC. This showed he belonged in the North Ward; I have no doubt of it. Beth knew when she took Christopher and left for parts unknown that Fat would try suicide; he'd tried it in Canada. In fact, Beth planned to move back in as soon as Fat offed himself. She told him so later. Also, she told him that it had infuriated her that he'd failed to kill himself. When he asked her why that had infuriated her, Beth said:

"You have once again shown your inability to do anything."

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it
is
a phantom.

Ironically, Fat hadn't been tossed into the lock-up because he was crazy (although he was); the reason, technically, consisted of the "danger to yourself" law. Fat constituted a menace to his own well-being, a charge that could be brought against many people. At the time he lived in the North Ward a number of psychological tests were administered to him. He passed them, but on the other hand he had the good sense not to talk about God. Though he passed all the tests, Fat had faked them out. To while away the time he drew over and over again pictures of the German knights who Alexander Nevsky had lured onto the ice, lured to their deaths. Fat identified with the heavily-armored Teutonic knights with their slot-eyed masks and ox-horns projecting out on each side; he drew each knight carrying a huge shield and a naked sword; on the shield Fat wrote: "
In hoc signo vinces,
"which he got from a pack of cigarettes. It means, "In this sign you shall conquer." The sign took the form of an
iron cross. His love of God had turned to anger, an obscure anger. He had visions of Christopher racing across a grassy field, his little blue coat flapping behind him, Christopher running and running. No doubt this was Horselover Fat himself running, the child in him, anyhow. Running from something as obscure as his anger.

In addition he several times wrote:

Dico per spiritum sanctum. Haec verltas est. Mihi crede et mecum in aeternitate vivebis. Entry #28.

This meant, "I speak by means of the Holy Spirit. This is the truth. Believe me and you will live with me in eternity."

One day on a list of printed instructions posted on the wall of the corridor he wrote:

Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.