Valis

14

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."

"A pot," I said.

"I saw it in a museum at Athens. It's authentic. That's not a matter of my opinion; I'm not qualified to judge such matters; its authenticity has been established by the museum authorities. I talked with one of them. He hadn't realized what the design shows; he was very interested when I discussed it with him. This form of vase, the krater, was the shape used later as the baptismal font. That was one of the Greek words that came into my head in March 1974, the word 'krater.' I heard it connected with another Greek word: 'poros.' The words 'poros krater' essentially mean 'limestone font.'"

There could be no doubt; the design, predating Christianity, was Crick and Watson's double helix model at which they had arrived after so many wrong guesses, so much trial-and-error work. Here it was, faithfully reproduced.

"Well?" I said.

"The so-called intertwined snakes of the caduceus. Originally the caduceus, which is still the symbol of medicine was the staff of -- not Hermes -- but -- " Fat paused, his eyes bright. "Of Asklepios. It has a very specific meaning, besides that of wisdom, which the snakes allude to; it shows that the bearer is a sacred person and not to be molested... which is why Hermes, the messenger of the gods, carried it."

None of us said anything for a time.

Kevin started to utter something sarcastic, something in his dry, witty way, but he did not; he only sat without speaking.

Examining the 8 X 10 glossies, Ginger said, "How lovely!"

"The greatest physician in all human history," Fat said to her. "Asklepios, the founder of Greek medicine. The Roman Emperor Julian -- known to us as Julian the Apostate because he renounced Christianity -- considered Asklepios as God or a god; Julian worshipped him. If that worship had continued, the entire history of the Western world would have basically changed."

"You won't give up," I said to Fat.

"No," Fat agreed. "I never will. I'm going back -- I ran out of money. When I've gotten the funds together, I'm going back. I know where to look, now. The Greek islands. Lemnos, Lesbos, Crete. Especially Crete. I dreamed I descended in an elevator -- in fact I had this dream twice -- and the elevator operator recited in verse, and there was a huge plate of spaghetti with a three-pronged fork, a trident, stuck in it... that would be Ariadne's thread by which she led Theseus out of the maze under Minos after he slew the Minotaur. The Minotaur, being half man and half beast is a monster which represents the demented deity Samael, in my opinion, the false demiurge of the Gnostics' system."

"The two-word mailgram," I said. "'KING FELIX.'"

Fat said, "I didn't find him."

"I see," I said.

"But he is somewhere," Fat said. "I know it. I will never give up." He returned the photos to their manila folder, put it back in the briefcase and closed it up.

Today he is in Turkey. He sent us a postcard showing the mosque which used to be the great Christian church called St. Sophia or Hagia Sophia, one of the wonders of the world, even though the roof collapsed during the Middle Ages and had to be rebuilt. You'll find schematics of its unique construction in most comprehensive textbooks on architecture. The central portion of the church seems to float, as if rising to heaven; anyhow that was the idea the Roman emperor Justinian had when he built it. He personally supervised the construction and he himself named it, a code name for Christ.

We will hear from Horselover Fat again. Kevin says so and I trust his judgment. Kevin would know. Kevin out of all of us has the least irrationality and, what matters more, the most faith. This is something it took me a long time to understand about him.

Faith is strange. It has to do, by definition, with things you can't prove. For example, this last Saturday morning I had the TV set on; I wasn't really watching it, since on Saturday morning there's nothing but kids' shows, and anyhow I don't watch daytime TV; I sometimes find it diminishes my loneliness, so I do turn it on as background. Anyhow, last Saturday they ran the usual string of commercials and for some reason at one point my conscious attention was attracted; I stopped what I had been doing and became fully alert

The TV station had run an ad for a supermarket chain; on the screen the words FOOD KING appeared -- and then they cut instantly, rushing their film along as fast as possible so as to squeeze in as many commercial messages as possible; what came next was a Felix the Cat cartoon, an old black-and-white cartoon. One moment FOOD KING appeared on the screen and then almost instantly the words -- also in huge letters -- FELIX THE CAT.

There it had been, the juxtaposed cypher, and in the proper order:

KING FELIX

But you would only pick it up subliminally. And who would be catching this accidental, purely accidental, juxtaposition? Only children, the little children of the Southland. It wouldn't mean anything to them; they would apprehend no two-word cypher, and even if they did they wouldn't understand what it meant, who it referred to.

But I had seen it and I knew who it referred to. It must be only synchronicity, as Jung calls it, I thought. Coincidence, without intent.

Or had the signal gone out? Out over the airwaves by one of the largest TV stations in the world, NBC's Los Angeles outlet, reaching many thousands of children with this split-second information which would be processed by the right hemispheres of their brains: received and stored and perhaps decoded, below the threshold of consciousness where many things lay slumbering and stored. And Eric and Linda Lampton had nothing to do with this. Just some board man, some technician at NBC with a whole stack of commercials to run, in any order he saw fit. It would have to be VALIS itself responsible, if anything had arranged the juxtaposition intentionally, VALIS which itself was information.

Maybe I had seen VALIS just now, riding a commercial and then a kids' cartoon.

The message has been sent out again, I said to myself.

Two days later Linda Lampton phoned me; I hadn't heard from the Lamptons since the tragedy. Linda sounded excited and happy.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

"Wonderful," I said. "How far along are you?"

"Eight months."

"Gee," I said, thinking, It won't be long.

"It won't be long now," Linda said.

"Are you hoping for a boy this time?" I said.

Linda said, "VALIS says it'll be another girl."

"Is Mini -- "

"He died, I'm sorry to say. There was no chance, not with what he had. Isn't it wonderful? Another child?"

"Do you have a name picked out?" I said.

"Not yet," Linda said.

On the TV that night I happened to catch a commercial for dog food. Dog food! At the very end, after listing various kinds of animals for which the company makes food -- I forget the name of the company -- a final coupling is stated:

"For the shepherd and the sheep."

A German shepherd dog is shown on the left and a great sheep on the right; immediately the station cut to another commercial which began with a sailboat silently passing across the screen. On the white sail I saw a small black emblem. Without looking more closely I knew what it was. On the sail the makers of the boat had placed a fish sign.

Shepherd and the sheep and then the fish, juxtaposed as had been KING FELIX. I don't know. I lack Kevin's faith and Fat's madness. But did I see consciously two quick messages fired off by VALIS in rapid succession, intended to strike us subliminally, one message really, telling us that the time had come? I don't know what to think. Maybe I am not required to think anything, or to have faith, or to have madness; maybe all I need to do -- all that is asked of me -- is to wait. To wait and to stay awake.

I waited, and one day I got a phonecall from Horselover Fat: a phonecall from Tokyo. He sounded healthy and excited and full of energy, and amused at my surprise to be hearing from him.

"Micronesia," he said.

"What?" I said, thinking that he had reverted back to the koine Greek again. And then I realized that he was referring to the group of small islands in the Pacific. "Oh," I said. "You've been there. The Carolines and Marshall Islands."

Fat said, "I'm going there; I haven't been, yet. The AI voice, the voice which I hear -- it told me to look among the Micronesian Islands."

"Aren't they sort of little?" I said.

"That's why they call them that." He laughed.

"How many islands?" I asked, thinking ten or twenty.

"More than two thousand."

"Two thousand!" I felt dismay. "You could look forever. Can't the AI voice narrow it down?"

"I'm hoping it will. Maybe to Guam; I'm flying to Guam and starting there. By the time I'm finished, I'll get to see where a lot of World War Two took place."

I said, "Interesting that the AI voice is back to using Greek words."

"Mikros meaning small," Fat said, "and nesoi meaning islands. Maybe you're right; maybe it's just its propensity for reverting to Greek. But it's worth a try."

"You know what Kevin would say," I said. "About the simple, unspoiled native girls in those two thousand islands."

"I'll be the judge of that," Fat said.

He rang off and I hung up the phone feeling better; it was good news to hear from him, and to find him sounding so hearty.

I have a sense of the goodness of men, these days. I don't know where this sense came from -- unless it came from Fat's phonecall -- but I feel it. This is March again, now. I asked myself, Is Fat having another experience? Is the beam of pink light back, firing new and vaster information to him? Is it narrowing his search down?

His original experience had come in March, at the day after the vernal equinox. "Vernal," of course, means "spring." And "equinox" means the time when the sun's center crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere of equal length. So Horselover Fat encountered God or Zebra or VALIS or his own immortal self on the first day of the year which has a longer stretch of light than of darkness. Also, according to some scholars, it is the actual day of birth of Christ.

Seated before my TV set I watched and waited for another message, I, one of the members of the little Rhipidon Society which still, in my mind, existed. Like the satellite in miniature in the film Valis, the microform of it run over by the taxi as if it were an empty beer can in the gutter, the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself. Kevin had expressed this thought. The divine intrudes where you least expect it.

"Look where you least expect to find it," Kevin had told Fat one time. How do you do that? It's a contradiction.

One night I dreamed I owned a small cabin directly on the water, an ocean this time; the water extended forever. And this cabin did not resemble any I had ever seen; it seemed more like a hut such as I had seen in movies about the South Pacific. And, as I awoke, the distinct thought entered my mind:

Garlands of flowers, singing and dancing, and the recital of myths, tales, and poetry.

Ilater remembered where I had read those words. In the article on Micronesian Cultures in the Britannica. The voice had spoken to me, reminding me of the place to which Horselover Fat had gone. In his search.

My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.