Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  Nicholas said, half to himself. “It all seemed sort of—like fun, back in Berkeley, these inner contacts with another mind, deep in the night, involuntarily, with me just lying there passive and having to hear whether I liked it or not. We were kids there in Berkeley; no one living in Berkeley ever really grows up. Perhaps that’s why Ferris Fremont loathes Berkeley so.”

  “You’re aware of him a lot,” I said, “now that you’re down here?”

  “I’m aware of Ferris Fremont,” Nicholas said cryptically. “Now that I’m down here, yes.”

  Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person, rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness. What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, Suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history… We would be hard put to defend the use of the term ‘imaginary’ then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an ‘imaginary’ voice telling him to sail west, or a ‘real’ voice telling him the idea was hopeless?

  Without Valis addressing him in his sleep, showing him visually a happier promise, speaking to him persuasively, Nicholas would have visited Disneyland and returned to Berkeley. I knew it and Nicholas knew it. Whether anyone else assessed it this way was unimportant; I knew him and I knew that on his own, unaided, he would have stayed in his rut forever. Something had intervened in Nicholas’s life and destroyed the hold that bad karma had on him. Something had severed the iron chains.

  This, I realized, is how a man becomes what he is not: by doing what he could never do—in Nicholas’s case, the totally impossible act of moving from Berkeley to Southern California. All his compeers would still be up there; I was still up there. It was spectacular; here he was, raised in Berkeley, sitting in his modern apartment (Berkeley has no modern apartments) in Placentia, wearing a florid Southern California-style shirt and slacks and shoes; already he had become part of the lifestyle here. The days of bluejeans were gone.

  7THE imaginary presence of Valis—whose name Nicholas had been forced to make up, for want of a real one—had made him into what he was not; had he gone to a psychiatrist he would still be what he was, and he would stay what he was. The psychiatrist would have focused his attention on the origin of the voice, not on its intentions or on the results. That very psychiatrist was probably still living in Berkeley. No nocturnal voices, no invisible presence sketching out a happier life, would have plagued him. How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.

  “Okay, Nick,” I said. “You win.”

  “Pardon?” He glanced at me, a little wearily. “Oh, I see. Yes, I guess I win. Phil, how could I have stayed in Berkeley so long? Why did it take someone else, another voice, not mine, to goad me into life? Why was that necessary?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “The incredible part is not that I heard Valis, listened to Valis, and moved here, but that without him, or them, I wouldn’t have contemplated it, let alone done it. Phil, the idea of leaving Berkeley, quitting my job with Herb Jackman—it wouldn’t even have entered my mind.”

  “Yeah, that is the incredible part,” I agreed. He was right. It said something about the normal trajectory of human existence, Homo unimpeded: allowed to trudge out his circular course, like a wedge of dead rock circling a dead sun, mindless and purposeless, deaf to the universe at large, as blind as it was cold. Something into which no new idea ever came. Barred forever from originality. It made you stop and reflect.

  Nicholas said. “Whoever they are, Phil, I have no choice but to trust them. I’m going to be doing what they want anyhow.”

  “I think you’ll know,” I said, “when your programming fires.” If indeed—sobering thought—he had been programmed.

  “You suppose I’ll notice? I’ll be too busy to notice.”

  That chilled me: the thought of him in action all at once, blurring, as if possessing sixteen arms.

  “They—” Nicholas continued.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call them ‘they,’” I said. “It makes me nervous. I’d be a lot less nervous if you’d say ‘he.’”

  “It’s the joke about the five-thousand-pound canary: where does it sleep?” Nicholas said.

  “Anywhere it wants.”

  “I call them ‘they,’” Nicholas said, “because I’ve seen more than one of them. A woman, a man. Two for openers, and two is they.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  After a pause, Nicholas said. “Of course you realize these were dreams. And dreams are distorted. The conscious mind sets up a barrier.”

  “To protect itself,” I finished.

  Nicholas said. “They had three eyes. The normal two, and then one with a lens, not a pupil. Dead center in the forehead. That third eye witnessed everything. They could turn it on and off, and when it was off it was entirely gone. Invisible. And during that time”—he took a deep shuddering breath—“they looked just like us. We—never guessed.” He became silent.

  “Oh, good God,” I said aloud.

  “Yep,” Nicholas said, stoically.

  “Did they speak?”

  “They were mute. And deaf. They were in round chambers like bathyspheres, with lots of wires running to them, like electronic booster equipment, communications equipment, phone-type wires. The wires and boosters were so they could communicate with us, so their thoughts would form words we could hear and understand, and so they could hear us back. It was difficult, a strain for them.”

  “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

  “Hell, you write about it all the time. I’ve been reading some of your novels, finally. You—”

  “Writing fiction,” I said. “It’s all fiction.”

  “Their craniums were enlarged,” Nicholas said.

  “What?” I was having trouble following him; it was too much for me.

  “To accommodate the third eye. Massive craniums. A wholly different skull shape from ours, very long. The Egyptian Pharaoh had it—Ikhnaton. And Ikhnaton’s two daughters, but not his wife. It was hereditary on his side.”

  I open the bedroom door and walked back into the living room where Rachel sat reading.

  “He’s crazy,” Rachel said remotely, not looking up from her book.

  “Right,” I said. “Completely. Nothing left. Only thing is, I don’t want to be here when his programming fires.”

  She said nothing; she turned a page.

  Following me out of the bedroom, Nicholas approached the two of us; he held a piece of paper toward me, for me to see. “This is a sign they showed me several times, two intersecting arcs arranged—well, you can see. It’s a little like the Christian fish sign, the side of the fish with the arcs forming its body. The interesting thing is, if an arc intersects once—”

  From the design on the extended piece of paper a pinkish-purple beam of light, an inch in diameter, fired upward into Nicholas’s face. He shut his eyes, grimaced with pain, dropped the sheet of paper, and swiftly put his hand to his forehead. “All of a sudden,” he said thickly. “I have the most violent headache.”

  “Didn’t you see that beam of light?” I said. Rachel had set down her book and was on her feet.

  Nicholas removed his hand from his forehead, opened his eyes, and blinked. “I’m blind,” he said.

  Silence. The three of us stood there, unmoving.

  “I can see phosphene activity now,” he said presently. “An after-light. No, I didn’t see any beam of light. But I see a phosphene circle. It’s pink. Now I can make out a few things.”

  Rachel moved toward him, took him by the shoulder. “You better sit down.”

  In an odd, even voice, almost mechanical in quality, Nicholas intoned. “Rachel, Johnny has a birth defect.”

  “The doct
or said nothing at all is—”

  “He has a right inguinal strangulated hernia. It’s already gone down into the scrota! sac. The hydroseal is broken, Johnny needs immediate surgery; go to the phone, pick it up, and dial Dr. Evenston. Tell him you’re bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St Jude Hospital in Fullerton. Tell him to be there.”

  “Tonight?” Rachel said, appalled.

  Nicholas intoned. “He is in imminent danger of death.” With his eyes shut he then repeated it, word for word, exactly as he had said it; watching him, I got the impression, suddenly, that even though his eyes were shut he was seeing the words. He spoke as if reading them off a cue card, like a performer. It was not his tone of voice, his cadence; he was following words written out for him.

  I accompanied them to the hospital. Rachel drove; Nicholas was still having trouble with his eyes, so he sat beside her holding the little boy. Their physician, Dr. Evenston, very irritable, met them at the emergency room. First he told them that he had examined Johnny several times for possible herniation and found nothing; then he took Johnny off; time passed; Dr. Evenston eventually returned and said noncommittally that there was indeed a right inguinal hernia, reducible but needing immediate surgery, since there was always the possibility of strangulation.

  On the way back to the Placentia apartment, I said. “Who are these people?”

  “Friends,” Nicholas said.

  “They certainly are interested in your welfare,” I said. “And your baby’s.”

  “Nothing wrong can happen,” Nicholas said.

  I said. “But such powers!”

  “They transferred information to my head,” Nicholas said, “but they didn’t heal Johnny. They just—”

  “They healed him,” I said. Getting him to the doctor and calling the doctor’s attention to the birth defect was healing him. Why exert supernatural powers when natural curative means lay at hand? I remembered something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: “For a penny,” the Buddha said. “I can board a ferry and do that.” It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all. Nicholas had missed the point. But he seemed dazed; as Rachel drove through the darkness he continued to massage his forehead and eyes.

  “The information was transferred simultaneously,” Nicholas said. “Not sequentially. It’s always that way. It’s what’s called analog, in computer science, in contrast to digital.”

  “You’re sure they’re friends?” Rachel said sharply.

  “Anyone who saves my boy’s life,” Nicholas said, “is a friend.”

  I said. “If they could convey all that exact information directly to your head like that, in one burst of colored light, they could let you know any time they want who they are, where they are from, and what they intend. Any confusion on your part regarding any of those issues is deliberate withholding of knowledge on their part. They don’t want you to know.”

  “If I knew, I’d tell people,” Nicholas said. “They don’t want to see—”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “It would defeat their purpose,” Nicholas said, after a pause. “They’re working against—” He ceased talking, then.

  “There’s a great deal you haven’t told me,” I said, “that you know about them.”

  “It’s all in the written pages.” He was silent for a few blocks and then said. “They’re working against great odds. So it follows that they have to operate with great caution. Or it will fail.” He did not elaborate. He probably didn’t know any more. Most of what he believed probably consisted of shrewd guesses, hatched out over long months of pondering.

  I had worked up a little speech to give; now I gave it. “There is a slight chance,” I said, “admittedly a very slight one, that what you’re dealing with is religious, that in fact you are being informed by the Holy Spirit, which is a manifestation of God. We’re all from Berkeley, raised there and limited by the secular viewpoint of a college town; we’re not inclined to theological speculation. But healing is a typical miracle of the Holy Spirit, or so I understand. You ought to know about that, Nicholas, from having been a Quaker.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “When the Holy Spirit takes you over it does heal.”

  “Heard any non-English languages in your head?” I asked him. “That you don’t know?”

  Presently he nodded. “Yes. In my dreams.”

  “Glossolalia,” I said.

  “Koine Greek. I wrote down a few words phonetically, what I could, when I woke up. Rachel took a year of Greek; she recognized them. We both looked them up in her dictionary: Koine Greek.”

  “Is that still—”

  “It qualifies. In the book of Acts in the Bible, other races recognized what the apostles were saying, in their own tongues, at Pentecost, when the Spirit first descended on them. Glossolalia isn’t nonsense; it’s foreign tongues you never knew. The Spirit brings them to your head so you can preach the gospel to every nation. It’s generally misunderstood. I thought it was gibberish until I researched it.”

  “You’ve been reading the Bible?” I asked. “During your research?”

  “The New Testament. And the Prophetic Books.”

  Rachel said. “Nick never knew any Greek. He was sure they weren’t real words.” The cruel biting quality had left her voice; worry about Johnny, and shock, had done it. “Nick very cautiously told a couple of people interested in the occult about dreaming in Greek, and they said, ‘It’s a past life. You’re the reincarnation of a Greek-speaking person.’ But I don’t think that’s it.”

  “What do you think it is?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. The Greek words were the first thing that signified anything to me, that I ever took seriously about this. And now tonight, his diagnosing Johnny…and I saw that pinkish-purple spark of light beamed up at him for an instant. I just don’t know, Phil; it doesn’t fit anything I’ve ever heard of. Nick seems to be catching glimpses of benign supernatural manipulators of some kind we don’t know about—just cryptic glimpses, what they want him to see. Not enough to extrapolate on. I get the impression they’re very old—from the Koine Greek, which is two thousand years out of the past. If they lapse into that, maybe there’s your one inadvertent clue.”

  In a hoarse voice Nicholas said abruptly. “Someone is waking up in me. After two thousand years, or almost that long. He’s not awake yet, but his time is coming. He’s been promised it…a long time ago, when he was alive like us.”

  “Is he human?” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” Nicholas nodded. “Or he was once. The programming they’re giving me—it’s to wake him. They’re having trouble, or anyhow it’s very difficult; it takes a lot of things to do it. This man, this person, is important to them. I don’t know why. I don’t know who the man is. I don’t know what he’ll do.” He lapsed into brooding silence for a time and then said, mostly to himself, as if he had said it or thought it many times before. “I don’t know what’s going to become of me when it happens. Maybe there are no plans for me at all.”

  “Are you sure you’re not throwing six different theories up into the air to see which lands first?” I said. “I can tell theories when I hear them—speculation. You don’t know, do you?”

  “No,” Nicholas admitted.

  “How long have you had this one?”

  “I don’t know. They’re all written down.”

  “In order of descending merit?”

  “In the order they came to me.”

  “And each one,” I said to him, “seemed equally true to you at the time.”

  Nicholas said. “One of them has to be true. Finally I’ll find it. I have to.”

  “You could go to your grave not knowing,” Rachel said.

  “I’ll understand it eventually,” Nicholas said doggedly.

  Maybe not, I thought; maybe she is right. Nicholas could flounder around forever, his stack of typed papers constantly
growing with theory after theory, each one more lurid than the last, more comprehensive, more daring. Finally the man slumbering within him whom they were attempting to arouse back into wakeful life could appear, take charge, and finish Nicholas’s thesis for him. Nicholas could write, I wonder if it’s…it may be that… I’m sure that…it has to be; and then the ancient man could rise into life and write down, He was correct; it is. I am.

  “The thing that has worried me,” Rachel said, “whenever you talked like this, is, What will he be like to me and Johnny if they’re able to waken him, and I guess tonight shows that he’ll take care of Johnny.”

  “With more than I can,” Nicholas said.

  “You’re not going to fight?” I said. “You’re just going to let it take you over?”

  Nicholas said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  To Rachel, I said. “Are there any vacant apartments in your building?” I was thinking to myself that as a freelance writer I could live anywhere. I didn’t have to remain in the Bay Area.

  Smiling a little, Rachel said. “You think you should be down here to help take care of him?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  8THEY had both evidently accepted the invasion of Nicholas by this entity; they seemed resigned and not afraid. That was more than I could manage; the whole thing seemed unnatural and terrifying to me, something to be fought with all one had at one’s disposal. The supplanting of a human personality by—whatever it was. Assuming Nicholas’s theories were correct. In point of fact he could be totally wrong. Even so, perhaps because of this, I wanted to be down here. Over the many years Nicholas had been my best friend; he still was, even though six hundred miles separated us. And, like him, I had begun to like the Placentia area. I liked the barrio. There was nothing like it in Berkeley.

  “It’s a nice gesture,” Rachel said, “to be with your friend at a time like this.”

  “It’s more than a gesture,” I said.

  “Before you move to Placentia,” Rachel said, “there is something I found out the other day by accident, that I don’t think either of you realize. I was driving along one of those little palm-lined streets, just driving at random, trying to get Johnny to calm down and go to sleep before we got back to the apartment, and I saw a green clapboard house with a sign on it. ‘Birthplace of Ferris F. Fremont,’ it said. I asked the manager of our building, and he said, Yes, Ferris Fremont was born in Placentia.”