Valis Page 2

  A few days later she was dead. They spent that night together, sleeping fully dressed; they did not make love; the next afternoon Gloria drove off, ostensibly to get her stuff from her parents’ house in Modesto. He never saw her again. For several days he waited for her to show up and then one night the phone rang and it was her ex-husband Bob.

  ‘Where are you right now?’ Bob asked.

  The question bewildered him; he was at home, where his phone was, in the kitchen. Bob sounded calm. ‘I’m here,’ Fat said.

  ‘Gloria killed herself today,’ Bob said.

  I have a photo of Gloria holding Chairman Mao in her arms; Gloria is kneeling and smiling and her eyes shine. Chairman Mao is trying to get down. To their left, part of a Christmas tree can be seen. On the back, Mrs Knudson has written in tidy letters:

  How we made her feel gratitude for our love.

  I’ve never been able to fathom whether Mrs Knudson wrote that after Gloria’s death or before. The Knudsons mailed me the photo a month – mailed Horselover Fat the photo a month – after Gloria’s funeral. Fat had written asking for a photo of her. Initially he had asked Bob, who replied in a savage tone, ‘What do you want a picture of Gloria for?’ To which Fat could give no answer. When Fat got me started writing this, he asked me why I thought Bob Langley got so mad at his request. I don’t know. I don’t care. Maybe Bob knew that Gloria and Fat had spent a night together and he was jealous. Fat used to say Bob Langley was a schizoid; he claimed that Bob himself told him that. A schizoid lacks proper affect to go with his thinking; he’s got what’s called ‘flattening of affect.’ A schizoid would see no reason not to tell you that about himself. On the other hand, Bob bent down after the graveside service and put a rose on Gloria’s coffin. That was about when Fat had gone crawling off to the VW. Which reaction is more appropriate? Fat weeping in the parked car by himself, or the ex-husband bending down with the rose, saying nothing, showing nothing, but doing something... Fat contributed nothing to the funeral except a bundle of flowers which he had belatedly bought on the trip down to Modesto. He had given them to Mrs Knudson, who remarked that they were lovely. Bob had picked them out.

  After the funeral, at the fancy restaurant where the waitress had moved the three of them out of view, Fat asked Bob what Gloria had been doing at Synanon, since she was supposed to be getting her possessions together and driving back up to Marin County to live with him – he had thought.

  ‘Carmina talked her into going to Synanon,’ Bob said. That was Mrs Knudson. ‘Because of her history of drug involvement.’

  Timothy, the friend Fat didn’t know, said, “They sure didn’t help her very much.’

  What had happened was that Gloria walked in the front door of Synanon and they had gamed her right off. Someone, on purpose, had walked past her as she sat waiting to be interviewed and had remarked on how ugly she was. The next person to parade past had informed her that her hair looked like something a rat slept in. Gloria had always been sensitive about her curly hair. She wished it was long like all the other hair in the world. What the third Synanon member would have said was moot, because by then Gloria had gone upstairs to the tenth floor.

  ‘Is that how Synanon works?’ Fat asked.

  Bob said, ‘It’s a technique to break down the personality. It’s a fascist therapy that makes the person totally outer-directed and dependent on the group. Then they can build up a new personality that isn’t drug oriented.’

  ‘Didn’t they realize she was suicidal?’ Timothy asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Bob said. ‘She phoned in and talked to them; they knew her name and why she was there.’

  ‘Did you talk to them after her death?’ Fat asked.

  Bob said, ‘I phoned them up and asked to talk to someone high up and I told him they had killed my wife, and the man said that they wanted me to come down there and teach them how to handle suicidal people. He was super upset. I felt sorry for him.’

  At that, hearing that, Fat decided that Bob himself was not right in the head. Bob felt sorry for Synanon. Bob was all fucked up. Everyone was fucked up, including Carmina Knudson. There wasn’t a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else. He sat eating his salad and wondering where he could go. Out of the country. Flee to Canada, like the draft protesters. He personally knew ten guys who had slipped across into Canada rather than fight in Vietnam. Probably in Vancouver he would run into half a dozen people he knew. Vancouver was supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Like San Francisco, it was a major port. He could start life all over and forget the past

  It entered his head as he sat fooling with his salad that when Bob phoned he hadn’t said, ‘Gloria killed herself’ but rather ‘Gloria killed herself today,’ as if it had been inevitable that she would do it one day or another. Perhaps this had done it, this assumption. Gloria had been timed, as if she were taking a math test. Who really was the insane one? Gloria or himself (probably himself) or her ex-husband or all of them, the Bay Area, not insane in the loose sense of the term but in the strict technical sense? Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.

  I wish I could have helped him.

  Chapter 2

  Although there was nothing I could do to help Horselover Fat, he did escape death. The first thing that came along to save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old high-school girl living down the street from him and the second was God. Of the two of them the girl did better.

  I’m not sure God did anything at all for him; in fact in some ways God made him sicker. This was a subject on which Fat and I could not agree. Fat was certain that God had healed him completely. That is not possible. There is a line in the I Ching reading, ‘Always ill but never dies.’ That fits my friend.

  Stephanie entered Fat’s life as a dope dealer. After Gloria’s death he did so much dope that he had to buy from every source available to him. Buying dope from highschool kids is not a smart move. It has nothing to do with dope itself but with the law and with morality. Once you begin to buy dope from kids you are a marked man. I’m sure it’s obvious why. But the thing I knew – which the authorities did not – is this: Horselover Fat really wasn’t interested in the dope that Stephanie had for sale. She dealt hash and grass but never uppers. She did not approve of uppers. Stephanie never sold anything she did not approve of. She never sold psychedelics no matter what pressure was put on her. Now and then she sold cocaine. Nobody could quite figure out her reasoning, but it was a form of reasoning. In the normal sense, Stephanie did not think at all. But she did arrive at decisions, and once she arrived at them no one could budge her. Fat liked her.

  There lay the gist of it; he liked her and not the dope, but to maintain a relationship with her he had to be a buyer, which meant he had to do hash. For Stephanie, hash was the beginning and end of life – life worth living, anyhow.

  If God came in a poor second, at least he wasn’t doing anything illegal, as Stephanie was. Fat was convinced that Stephanie would wind up in jail; he expected her to be arrested any day. All Fat’s friends expected him to be arrested any day. We worried about that and about his slow decline into depression and psychosis and isolation. Fat worried about Stephanie. Stephanie worried about the price of hash. More so, she worried about the price of cocaine. We used to imagine her suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and exclaiming, ‘Coke has gone up to a hundred dollars a gram!’ She worried about the price of dope the way normal women worry about the price of coffee.

  We used to argue that Stephanie could not have existed before the Sixties. Dope had brought her into being, summoned her out of the very ground. She was a coefficient of dope, part of an equation. And yet it was through her that Fat made his way eventually to God. Not through her dope; it had n
othing to do with dope. There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous. The means by which Stephanie brought Horse-lover Fat to God was by means of a little clay pot which she threw on her kickwheel, a kickwheel which Fat had helped pay for, as a present on her eighteenth birthday. When he fled to Canada he took the pot with him, wrapped up in shorts, socks and shirts, in his single suitcase.

  It looked like an ordinary pot: squat and light brown, with a small amount of blue glaze as trim. Stephanie was not an expert potter. This pot was one of the first she threw, at least outside of her ceramics class in high school. Naturally, one of her first pots would go to Fat. She and he had a close relationship. When he’d get upset, Stephanie would quiet him down by supercharging him with her hashpipe. The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn’t say. In Horselover Fat’s case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late. You can’t hold Stephanie responsible for that; she threw the pot, glazed it and fired it as soon as she had the kickwheel. She did her best to help her friend Fat, who, like Gloria before him, was beginning to die. She helped her friend the way Fat had tried to help his friend, only Stephanie did a better job. But that was the difference between her and Fat. In a crisis she knew what to do. Fat did not. Therefore Fat is alive today and Gloria is not. Fat had a better friend than Gloria had had. Perhaps he would have wanted it the other way around but the option was not his. We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of those decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity. Fat got God, and Gloria Knudson got death. It is unfair and Fat would be the first person to say so. Give him credit for that.

  After he had encountered God, Fat developed a love for him which was not normal. It is not what is usually meant in saying that someone ‘loves God.’ With Fat it was an actual hunger. And stranger still, he explained to us that God had injured him and still he yearned for him, like a drunk yearns for booze. God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it’s exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color.

  However, he could never really find it again. Nothing could generate that color for light but God. In other words, normal light did not contain that color. One time Fat studied a color chart, a chart of the visible spectrum. The color was absent. He had seen a color which no one can see; it lay off the end.

  What comes after light in terms of frequency? Heat? Radio waves? I should know but I don’t. Fat told me (I don’t know how true this is) that in the solar spectrum what he saw was above seven hundred millimicrons; in terms of Fraunhofer Lines, past B in the direction of A. Make of that what you will. I deem it a symptom of Fat’s breakdown. People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.

  It fails as far as we are concerned, but the unhappy fact is that it sometimes provides a spurious rationalization to the disintegrating mind – like Gloria’s ‘they.’ I looked up the Fraunhofer Lines one time, and there is no ‘A.’ The earliest letter-indication that I could find is B. It goes from G to B, from ultraviolet to infrared. That’s it. There is no more. What Fat saw, or thought he saw, was not light.

  After he returned from Canada – after he got God – Fat and I spent a lot of time together, and in the course of our going out at night, a regular event with us, cruising for action, seeing what was happening, we one time were in the process of parking my car when all at once a spot of pink light showed up on my left arm. I know what it was, although I had never seen such a thing before; someone had turned a laser beam on us.

  ‘That’s a laser,’ I said to Fat, who had seen it, too, since the spot was moving all around, onto telephone poles and the cement wall of the garage.

  Two teenagers stood at the far end of the street holding a square object between them.

  ‘They built the goddam thing,’ I said.

  The kids walked up to us, grinning. They had built it, they told us, from a kit. We told them how impressed we were, and they walked off to spook someone else.

  ‘That color pink?’ I asked Fat.

  He said nothing. But I had the impression that he was not being up front with me. I had the feeling that I had seen his color. Why he would not say so, if such it was, I do not know. Maybe the notion spoiled a more elegant theory. The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

  The cardinal point which Fat had made to us regarding his experience with the pink beam which had injured and blinded him was this: he claimed that instantly – as soon as the beam struck him – he knew things he had never known. He knew, specifically, that his five-year-old son had an undiagnosed birth defect and he knew what that birth defect consisted of, down to the anatomical details. Down, in fact, to the medical specifics to relate to the doctor.

  I wanted to see how he told it to the doctor. How he explained knowing the medical details. His brain had trapped all the information the beam of pink light had nailed him with, but how would he account for it?

  Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information. He started keeping a journal – had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his – Fat’s, not God’s-handwriting.

  The term ‘journal’ is mine, not Fat’s. His term was ‘exegesis’, a theological term meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture. Fat believed that the information fired at him and progressively crammed into his head in successive waves had a holy origin and hence should be regarded as a form of scripture, even if it just applied to his son’s undiagnosed right inguinal hernia which had popped the hydrocele and gone down into the scrotal sack. This was the news Fat had for the doctor. The news turned out to be correct, as was confirmed when Fat’s ex-wife took Christopher in to be examined. Surgery was scheduled for the next day, which is to say as soon as possible. The surgeon cheerfully informed Fat and his ex-wife that Christopher’s life had been in danger for years. He could have died during the night from a strangulated piece of his own gut. It was fortunate, the surgeon said, that they had found out about it. Thus again Gloria’s ‘they,’ except that in this instance the ‘they’ actually existed.

  The surgery came off a success, and Christopher stopped being such a complaining child. He had been in pain since birth. After that, Fat and his ex-wife took their son to another GP, one who had eyes.

  One of the paragraphs in Fat’s journal impressed me enough to copy it out and include it here. It does not deal with right inguinal hernias but is more general in nature, expressing Fat’s growing opinion that the nature of the universe is information. He had begun to believe this because for him the universe-his universe-was indeed fast turning into information. Once God started talking to him he never seemed to stop. I don’t think they report that in the Bible.

  Journal entry #37. Thoughts of the Brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements – change – in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract
the information in it – i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

  Fat kept working this particular theme over and over again, both in his journal and in his oral discourse to his friends. He felt sure the universe had begun to talk to him. Another entry in his journal reads:

  #36. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word ‘idiot’ is the word ‘private.’ Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

  To which I personally am tempted to say, Speak for yourself, Fat.

  Over a long period of time (or ‘Desarts of vast Eternity,’ as he would have put it) Fat developed a lot of unusual theories to account for his contact with God, and the information derived therefrom. One in particular struck me as interesting, being different from the others. It amounted to a kind of mental capitulation by Fat to what he was undergoing. This theory held that in actuality he wasn’t experiencing anything at all. Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams emanating from far off, perhaps millions of miles away. These selective brain-site stimulations generated in his head the impression – for him – that he was in fact seeing and hearing words, pictures, figures of people, printed pages, in short God and God’s Message, or, as Fat liked to call it, the Logos. But (this particular theory held) he really only imagined he experienced these things. They resembled holograms. What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner, Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds. In effect, he no longer claimed that what he experienced was actually there. Did this indicate he had begun to get better? Hardly. Now he held the view that ‘they’ or God or someone owned a long-range very tight information-rich beam of energy focussed on Fat’s head. In this I saw no improvement, but it did represent a change. Fat could now honestly discount his hallucinations, which meant he recognized them as such. But, like Gloria, he now had a ‘they.’ It seemed to me a Pyrrhic victory. Fat’s life struck me as a litany of exactly that, as, for example, the way he had rescued Gloria.