Valis (6 page)

Doug asked him what it meant.

"'
From God we are born,'" Fat translated,
"'
in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again.'"

"You're going to be here ninety days," Doug said.

One time Fat found a posted notice that fascinated him. The notice stipulated what could not be done, in order of descending importance. Near the top of the list all parties concerned were told:

NO ONE IS TO REMOVE ASHTRAYS FROM THE
WARD.

And later down the list it stated:

FRONTAL LOBOTOMIES ARE NOT TO BE PER
FORMED WITHOUT THE WRITTEN CONSENT
OF THE PATIENT.

"That should read 'prefrontal,'" Doug said, and wrote in the "pre."

"How do you know that?" Fat said.

"There's two ways of knowing," Doug said. "Either knowledge arises through the sense organs and is called empirical knowledge, or it arises within your head and it's called
a priori.
"Doug wrote on the notice:

IF I BRING BACK THE ASHTRAYS, CAN I HAVE
MY PREFRONTAL?

"You'll be here ninety days," Fat said.

Outside the building rain poured down. It had been raining since Fat arrived in the North Ward. If he stood on top of the washing machine in the laundry room, he could see out through a barred window to the parking lot. People parked their cars and then ran through the rain. Fat felt glad he was indoors, in the ward.

Dr. Stone, who had charge of the ward, interviewed him one day.

"Did you ever try suicide before?" Dr. Stone asked him.

"No," Fat said, which of course wasn't true. At that moment he no longer remembered Canada. It was his impression that his life had begun two weeks ago when Beth walked out.

"I think," Dr. Stone said, "that when you tried to kill yourself you got in touch with reality for the first time."

"Maybe so," Fat said.

"What I am going to give you," Dr. Stone said, opening a black suitcase on his small cluttered desk, "we term the Bach remedies." He pronounced it
batch.
"These organic remedies are distilled from certain flowers which grow in Wales. Dr. Bach wandered through the fields and pastures of Wales experiencing every negative mental state that exists. With each state that he experienced he gently held one flower after another. The proper flower trembled in the cup of Dr. Bach's hand and he then developed unique methods of acquiring an essence in elixir form of each flower and combinations of flowers which I have prepared in a rum base." He put three bottles together on the desk, found a larger, empty bottle, and poured the contents of the three into it. "Take six drops a day," Dr. Stone said. There is no way the Bach remedies can hurt you. They are not toxic chemicals. They will remove your sense of helplessness and fear and inability to act. My diagnosis is that those are the three areas where you have blocks: fear, helplessness and an inability to act. What you should have done instead of trying to kill yourself would have been, take your son away from your wife -- it's the law in California that a minor child must remain with his father until there is a court order to the contrary. And then you
should have lightly struck your wife with a rolled-up newspaper or a phonebook."

"Thank you," Fat said, accepting the bottle. He could see that Dr. Stone was totally crazy, but in a good way. Dr. Stone was the first person at the North Ward, outside the patients, who had talked to him as if he were human.

"You have much anger in you," Dr. Stone said. "I am lending you a copy of the
Tao Te Ching.
Have you ever read Lao
Tzu?"

"No," Fat admitted.

"Let me read you this part here," Dr. Stone said. He read aloud.

"Its upper part is not dazzling;

Its lower part is not obscure.

Dimly visible, it cannot be named

And returns to that which is without substance.

This is called the shape that has no shape,

The image that is without substance.

This is called indistinct and shadowy.

Go up to it and you will not see its head;

Follow behind it and you will not see its rear."

Hearing this, Fat remembered entries #1 and #2 from his Journal. He quoted them, from memory, to Dr. Stone.

#1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.

#2.
The Mind lets in the light, then the dark; in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.

"But," Dr. Stone said, "if Mind awards victory to the light, and the dark disappears, then reality will disappear, since reality is a compound of Yang and Yin equally."

"Yang is Form I of Paramenides
[sic]
," Fat said. "Yin is Form II. Parmenides argued that Form II does not in fact exist. Only Form I exists. Parmenides believed in a monistic world. People
imagine
that both forms exist, but they are wrong. Aristotle relates that Parmenides equates Form I with 'that which is' and Form II with 'that which is not.' Thus people are deluded."

Eying him, Dr. Stone said, "What's your source?"

"Edward Hussey," Fat said.

"He's at Oxford," Dr. Stone said. "I attended Oxford. In my opinion Hussey has no peer."

"You're right," Fat said.

"What else can you tell me?" Dr. Stone said.

Fat said, "Time does not exist. This is the great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno. The universe is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. Entry
#18 of my exegesis reads:
"Real time ceased in 70 c.e. with the fall of the Temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind.'"

"Interpolated by whom?" Dr. Stone asked.

"The Black Iron Prison, which is an expression of the Empire. What has been
--
" Fat had started to say, "What has been revealed to me." He rechose his words. "What has been most important in my discoveries is this:
'The Empire never ended.'"

Leaning against his desk, Dr. Stone folded his arms, rocked forward and back and studied Fat, waiting to hear more.

"That's all I know," Fat said, becoming belatedly cautious.

"I'm very interested in what you're saying," Dr. Stone said.

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane -- not just insane but totally so -- or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out, and now knew that Fat was totally insane. Which meant that Fat could look forward to a court appearance and ninety days.

This is a mournful discovery.

1)
Those who agree with you are insane.

2)
Those who do not agree with you are in power.

These were the twin realizations which now percolated through Fat's head. He decided to go for broke, to tell Dr. Stone the most fantastic entry in his exegesis.

"Entry number twenty-four,"
Fat said.
"In dormant seed form, as living information, the plasmate slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion until
--
"

"What is 'Chenoboskion'?" Dr. Stone interrupted.

"Nag Hammadi."

"Oh, the Gnostic library." Dr. Stone nodded. "Found and read in 1945 but never published. 'Living information'?" His eyes fixed themselves in intent scrutiny of Fat. "'Living information,'" he echoed. And then he said, "The Logos."

Fat trembled.

"Yes," Dr. Stone said. "The Logos would be living information, capable of replicating."

"Replicating not through information," Fat said, "in information, but
as
information. This is what Jesus meant when he spoke elliptically of the 'mustard seed' which, he said, 'would grow into a tree large enough for birds to roost in.'"

"There is no mustard tree," Dr. Stone agreed. "So Jesus could not have meant that literally. That fits with the so-called 'secrecy' theme of Mark; that he didn't want outsiders to know the truth. And you know?"

"Jesus foresaw not only his own death but that of all
--
"
Fat hesitated.
"Homoplasmates. That's a human being to which the plasmate has crossbonded. Interspecies symbiosis. As living information the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host
--
"

Dr. Stone grunted and squeezed himself violently.

"
--
in which to replicate itself into its active form,"
Fat said.
"The Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts but could not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant buried plasmate."

"But you're saying the plasmate -- the Logos -- was dug up at Nag Hammadi!"

"Yes, when the codices were read."

"You're sure it wasn't in dormant seed form at Qumran? In Cave Five?"

"Well," Fat said, uncertainly.

"Where did the plasmate originally come from?"

After a pause Fat said, "From another star system."

"You wish to identify that star system?"

"Sirius," Fat said.

"Then you believe that the Dogon People of the western Sudan are the source of Christianity."

"They use the fish sign," Fat said. "For Nommo, the benign twin."

"Who would be Form I or Yang."

"Right," Fat said.

"And Yuragu is Form II. But you believe that Form II doesn't exist."

"Nommo had to slay her," Fat said.

"That's what the Japanese myth stipulates, in a sense," Dr. Stone said. "Their cosmogonical myth. The female twin dies giving birth to fire; then she descends under the ground. The male twin goes after her to restore her but finds her decomposing and giving birth to monsters. She pursues him and he seals her up under the ground."

Amazed, Fat said, "She's decomposing and yet she's still giving birth?"

"Only to monsters," Dr. Stone said.

About this time two new propositions entered Fat's mind, due to this particular conversation.

1)
Some of those in power are insane.

2)
And they are right

By "right" read "in touch with reality." Fat had reverted back to his most dismal insight, that the universe and the Mind behind it which governed it are both totally irrational. He wondered if he should mention this to Dr. Stone, who seemed to understand Fat better than anyone else during all Fat's life.

"Dr. Stone," he said, "there's something I want to ask you. I want your professional opinion."

"Name it."

"Could the universe possibly be irrational?"

"You mean not guided by a mind. I suggest you turn to Xenophanes."

"Sure," Fat said. "Xenophanes of Colophon. 'One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not right
--
'"

"'Fitting,'" Dr. Stone corrected. "'It is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.' And the important part,
Fragment 25.
'But, effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind.'"

"But he could be irrational," Fat said.

"How
would we know?"

"The whole universe would be irrational.
"

Dr. Stone said, "Compared with what?"

That, Fat hadn't thought of. But as soon as he thought of it he realized that it did not tear down his fear; it increased it. If the whole universe were irrational, because it was directed by an irrational -- that is to say, insane -- mind, whole species could come into existence, live and perish and never guess, precisely for the reason that Stone had just given.

"The Logos isn't irrational,
"
Fat decided out loud. "What I call the plasmate. Buried as information in the codices at Nag Hammadi. Which is back with us now, creating new homoplasmates. The Romans, the Empire, killed all the original ones."

"But you say real time ceased in 70 a.d. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. Therefore these are still Roman times; the Romans are still here. This is roughly
--
" Dr. Stone calculated. "About 100 a.d."

Fat realized, then, that this explained his double exposure, the superimposition he had seen of ancient Rome and California 1974. Dr. Stone had solved it for him.

The psychiatrist in charge of treating him for his lunacy had ratified it. Now Fat would never depart from faith in his encounter with God. Dr. Stone had nailed it down.

Fat spent thirteen days at North Ward, drinking coffee and reading and walking around with Doug, but he never got to talk to Dr. Stone again because Stone had too many responsibilities, inasmuch as he had charge of the whole ward and everyone in it, staff and patients alike.

Well, he did have one brief dipshit hurried interchange at the time of his discharge from the ward.

"I think you're ready to leave," Stone said cheerfully.

Fat said, "But let me ask you. I'm not talking about no mind at all directing the universe. I'm talking about a mind like Xenophanes conceived of, but the mind is insane."

"The Gnostics believed that the creator deity was insane," Stone said. "Blind. I want to show you something. It hasn't been published yet; I have it in a typescript from Orval Wintermute who is currently working with Bethge in translating the Nag Hammadi codices. This quote comes from
On The Origin
of the World.
Read it."

Fat read it to himself, holding the precious typescript.

"He said, 'I am god and no other one exists except me.'
But when he said these things, he sinned against all of
the immortal (imperishable) ones, and they protected
him. Moreover, when Pistis saw the impiety of the chief
ruler, she was angry. Without being seen, she said,
'You err, Samael,' i.e. the blind god.' 'An enlightened,
immortal man exists before you. This will appear within your molded bodies. He will trample upon you like
potter's clay, (which) is trampled. And you will
go
with those who are yours down to your mother, the
abyss.'"

At once, Fat understood what he had read. Samael was the creator deity and he imagined that he was the only god, as stated in Genesis. However, he was blind, which is to say, occluded. "Occluded" was Fat's salient term. It embraced all other terms: insane, mad, irrational, whacked out, fucked up, fried, psychotic. In his blindness (state of irrationality; i.e. cut off from reality), he did not realize that
--

What did the typescript say? Feverishly, he searched over it, at which Dr. Stone thereupon patted him on the arm and told him he could keep the typescript; Stone had Xeroxed it several times over.

An enlightened, immortal man existed before the creator deity, and that enlightened, immortal man would appear within the human race which Samael was going to create. And that enlightened, immortal man who had existed
before
the creator deity would trample upon the fucked-up blind deluded creator like potter's clay.

Hence Fat's encounter with God -- the true God -- had come through the little pot Oh Ho which Stephanie had thrown for him on her kickwheel.

"Then I'm right about Nag Hammadi," he said to Dr. Stone.

"You would know," Dr. Stone said, and then he said something that no one had ever said to Fat before. "You're the authority," Dr. Stone said.

Fat realized that Stone had restored his -- Fat's -- spiritual life. Stone had saved him; he was a master psychiatrist. Everything which Stone had said and done
vis-à-vis
Fat had a therapeutic basis, a therapeutic thrust. Whether the content of Stone's information was correct was not important; his purpose from the beginning had been to restore Fat's faith in himself, which had vanished when Beth left -- which had vanished, actually, when he had failed to save Gloria's life years ago.

Dr. Stone wasn't insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.

I'll be goddamned, Fat thought.

In that simple sentence, "You're the authority," Stone had given Fat back his soul.

The soul which Gloria, with her hideous malignant psychological death-game, had taken away.

They -- note the "they" -- paid Dr. Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity; but they failed to find and remove the bullet. The fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of Freud's original attack on the psychologically injured person; Freud had understood: he called it a trauma. Later on, everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet; it took too long. Too much had to be learned about the patient. Dr. Stone had a paranormal talent, like his paranormal Bach remedies which were a palpable hoax, a pretext to listen to the patient. Rum with a flower dipped in it -- nothing more, but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said.

Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat's life. To get to Stone, Fat had had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God's mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act on the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured.

I wonder where Leon Stone practices now. I wonder what his recovery rate is. I wonder how he got his paranormal abilities. I wonder a lot of things. The worst event in Fat's life -- Beth leaving him, taking Christopher, and Fat trying to kill himself -- had brought on limitless benign consequences. If you judge the merits of a sequence by their final outcome, Fat had just gone through the best period of his life; he emerged from North Ward as strong as he would ever get. After all, no man is infinitely strong; for every creature that
runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in. But Dr. Stone had added the missing element to Fat, the element taken away from him, half-deliberately, by Gloria Knudson, who wished to take as many people with her as she could: self-confidence. "You are the authority," Stone had said, and that sufficed.

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second. Stephanie had come close when she made the little ceramic pot Oh Ho and presented it to Fat as her gift of love, a love she lacked the verbals skills to articulate.

How, when Stone gave Fat the typscript [sic]
material from the Nag Hammadi codex, had he known the significance of
pot
and
potter
to Fat? To know that, Stone would have to be telepathic. Well, I have no theory. Fat, of course, has. He believes that like Stephanie, Dr. Stone was a micro-form of God. That's why I say Fat is nearly healed, not healed.

Yet by regarding benign people as micro-forms of God, Fat at least remained in touch with a good god, not a blind, cruel or evil one. That point should be considered. Fat had a high regard for God. If the Logos was rational, and the Logos equaled God, then God had to be rational. This is why the Fourth Gospel's statement about the identity of the Logos is so important:
"Kai theos en ho logos"
which is to say "and the word was God." In the New Testament, Jesus says that no one has seen God but him; that is, Jesus Christ, the Logos of the Fourth Gospel. If that be correct, what Fat experienced was the Logos. But the Logos
is
God; so to experience Christ is to experience God. Perhaps a more important statement shows up in a book of the New Testament which most people don't read; they read the gospels and the letters of Paul, but who reads
One John
?

"My dear people, we are already the children
of God but what we are to be in the future
has not yet been revealed; all we know is,
that we shall be like him because we shall
see him as he really is."
(
1 John 3:1/2.
)

It can be argued that this is the most important statement in the New Testament; certainly it is the most important not-generally-known statement.
We shall be like him.
That means that man is isomorphic with God.
We shall see him as he really is.
There will occur a theophany, at least to some. Fat could base the credentials for his whole encounter on this passage. He could claim that his encounter with God consisted of a fulfillment of the promise of
1
John 3:1/2 --
as Bible scholars indicate it, a sort of code which they can read off in an instant, as cryptic as it looks. Oddly, to a certain extent this passage dovetails with the Nag Hammadi typescript that Dr. Stone handed to Fat the day Fat got discharged from North Ward. Man and the true God are identical -- as the Logos and the true God are -- but a lunatic blind creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God
against
the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat's question, "Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?" receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: "Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is
not
irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos," which, according to Fat, is living information.

Perhaps Fat had discerned a vast mystery, in calling the Logos living information. But perhaps not. Proving things of this sort is difficult. Who do you ask? Fat, fortunately, asked Leon Stone. He might have asked one of the staff, in which case he would still be in North Ward drinking coffee, reading, walking around with Doug.

Above everything else, outranking every other aspect, object, quality of his encounter, Fat had witnessed a benign power
which had invaded this world.
No other term fitted it:
the benign power, whatever it was, had
invaded
this world, like a champion ready to do battle. That terrified him but it also excited his joy because he understood what it meant. Help had come.

The universe might be irrational, but something rational had broken into it, like a thief in the night breaks into a sleeping household, unexpectedly in terms of place, in terms of time. Fat had seen it -- not because there was anything special about him -- but because it had wanted him to see it.

Normally it remained camouflaged. Normally when it appeared no one could distinguish it from ground -- set to ground, as Fat correctly expressed it. He had a name for it.

Zebra. Because it blended. The name for this is mimesis. Another name is mimicry. Certain insects do this; they mimic other things: sometimes other insects -- poisonous ones -- or twigs and the like. Certain biologists and naturalists have speculated that higher forms of mimicry might exist, since lower forms -- which is to say, forms which fool those intended to be fooled but not us -- have been found all over the world.

What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed -- such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it
wanted
to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. "Disclose" might in this case equal "theophany." The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which had come here at some time in the past... and perhaps, as Fat conjectured, had slumbered for nearly two thousand years in dormant seed form as living information in the codices at Nag Hammadi, which explained why reports of its existence had broken off abruptly around 70 a.d.

Entry #33 in Fat's journal (i.e. his exegesis):

This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.

A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:

1)
Each object is independently alive.

2)
Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.

Fat had found a land of middle ground. The universe consists of one vast irrational entity
into which
has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisticated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains -- by us -- undetected. It mimics objects and causal processes (this is what Fat claims); not just objects but what the objects do. From this, you can gather that Fat conceives of Zebra as very large.

After a year of analyzing his encounter with Zebra, or God, or the Logos, whatever, Fat came first to the conclusion that it had invaded our universe; and a year later he realized that it was consuming -- that is, devouring -- our universe. Zebra accomplished this by a process much like transubstantia
t
ion. This is the miracle of communion in which the two species, the wine and bread, invisibly become the blood and body of Christ.

Instead of seeing this in church, Fat had seen it out in the world; and not in micro-form but in macro-form, which is to say, on a scale so vast that he could not estimate its limits. The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord. And with this process comes not just sentience but -- sanity. For Fat this would be a blessed relief. He had put up with insanity for too long, both in himself and outside himself. Nothing could have pleased him more.