Valis

  Touching the golden fish with one slender finger, the girl said, ‘This is a sign used by the early Christians.’

  Instantly, Fat experienced a flashback. He remembered – just for a half-second. Remembered ancient Rome and himself: as an early Christian; the entire ancient world and his furtive frightened life as a secret Christian hunted by the Roman authorities burst over his mind ... and then he was back in California 1974 accepting the little white bag of pain pills.

  A month later as he lay in bed unable to sleep, in the semi-gloom, listening to the radio, he started to see floating colors. Then the radio shrilled hideous, ugly sentences at him. And, after two days of this, the vague colors begin to rush toward him as if he were himself moving forward, faster and faster; and, as I depicted in my novel A Scanner Darkly, the vague colors abruptly froze into sharp focus in the form of modern abstract paintings, literally tens of millions of them in rapid succession.

  Meta-circuits in Fat’s brain had been disinhibited by the fish sign and the words spoken by the girl.

  It’s as simple as that.

  A few days later, Fat woke up and saw ancient Rome superimposed on California 1974 and thought in koine Greek, the lingua franca of the Near East part of the Roman world, which was the part he saw. He did not know that the koine was their lingua franca; he supposed that Latin was. And in addition, as I’ve already told you, he did not recognize the language of his thoughts even as a language.

  Horselover Fat is living in two different times and two different places; i.e. in two space-time continua; that is what took place in March 1974 because of the ancient fish-sign presented to him the month before: his two space-time continua ceased to be separate and merged. And his two identities – personalities – also merged. Later, he heard a voice thing inside his head:

  “There’s someone else living in me and he’s not in this century.’

  The other personality had figured it out The other personality was thinking. And Fat – especially just before he fell asleep at night – could pick up the thoughts of this other personality, as recently as a month ago; which is to say, four-and-a-half years after the compartmentalization of the two persons broke down.

  Fat himself expressed it very well to me in early 1975 when he first began to confide in me. He called the personality in him living in another century and at another place ‘Thomas.’

  ‘Thomas,’ Fat told me, ‘is smarter than I am, and he knows more than I do. Of the two of us Thomas is the master personality.’ He considered that good; woe unto someone who has an evil or stupid other-personality in his head!

  I said, ‘You mean once you were Thomas. You’re a reincarnation of him and you remembered him and his –’

  ‘No, he’s living now. Living in ancient Rome now. And he is not me. Reincarnation has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But your body,’ I said.

  Fat stared at me, nodding. ‘Right. It means my body is either in two space-time continua simultaneously, or else my body is nowhere at all.’

  Entry #14 from the tractate: The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.

  Entry #30, which is a restatement for emphasis: The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

  Fat had scared the shit out of me. He had extrapolated entries #14 and #30 from his experience, inferred them from discovering that someone else existed in his head and that someone else was living in a different place at a different time – two thousand years ago and eight thousand miles away.

  We are not individuals. We are stations in a single Mind. We are supposed to remain separate from one another at all times. However, Fat had received by accident a signal (the golden fish sign) intended for Thomas. It was Thomas who dealt in fish signs, not Fat. If the girl hadn’t explained the meaning of the sign, the breakdown of compartmentalization would not have occurred. But she did and it did. Space and time were revealed to Fat – and to Thomas! – as mere mechanisms of separation. Fat found himself viewing a double exposure of two realities superimposed, and Thomas probably found himself doing the same. Thomas probably wondered what the hell foreign language was happening in his head. Then he realized it wasn’t even his head:

  “There’s someone else living in me and he’s not in this century.’ That was Thomas thinking that, not Fat. But it applied to Fat equally.

  But Thomas had the edge over Fat, because, as Fat said, Thomas was smarter; he was the master personality. He took over Fat, switched him off wine and onto beer, trimmed his beard, had trouble with the car ... but more important, Thomas remembered – if that is the word – other selves, one in Minoan Crete, which is from 3000 B.C.E. to 1100 B.C.E., a long, long time ago. Thomas even remembered a self before that: one which had come to this planet from the stars.

  Thomas was the ultimate non-fool of Post Neolithic times.

  As an early Christian, of the apostolic age; he had not seen Jesus but he knew people who had – my God, I’m losing control, here, trying to write this down. Thomas had figured out how to reconstitute himself after his physical death. All the early Christians knew how. It worked through anamnesis, the loss of amnesia which – well, the system was supposed to work this way: when Thomas found himself dying, he would engram himself on the Christian fish sign, eat some strange pink – the same pink color as in the light which Fat had seen – some strange pink food and drink from a sacred pitcher kept in a cool cupboard, and then die, and when he was reborn, he would grow up and be a later person, not himself, until he was shown the fish sign.

  He had anticipated this happening about forty years after his death. Wrong. It took almost two thousand years.

  In this way, through this mechanism, time was abolished. Or, put another way, the tyranny of death was abolished. The promise of eternal life which Christ held out to his little flock was no hoax. Christ had taught them how to do it; it had to do with the immortal plasmate which Fat talked about, the living information slumbering at Nag Hammadi century after century. The Romans had found and murdered all the homoplasmates – all the early Christians crossbonded to the plasmate; they died, the plasmate escaped to Nag Hammadi and slumbered as information on the codices.

  Until, in 1945, the library was discovered and dug up – and read. So Thomas had to wait – not forty years – but two thousand; because the golden fish sign wasn’t enough. Immortality, the abolition of time and space, comes only through the Logos or plasmate; only it is immortal.

  We are talking about Christ. He is an extra-terrestrial life form which came to this planet thousands of years ago, and, as living information, passed into the brains of human beings already living here, the native population. We are talking about interspecies symbiosis.

  Before being Christ he was Elijah. The Jews know all about Elijah and his immortality – and his ability to extend immortality to others by ‘dividing up his spirit.’ The Qumran people knew this. They sought to receive, part of Elijah’s spirit

  ‘You see, my son, here time changes into space.’

  First you change it into space and then you walk through it, but as Parsifal realized, he was not moving at all; he stood still and the landscape changed; it underwent a metamorphosis. For a while he must have experienced a double exposure, a superimposition, as Fat did. This is the dream-time, which exists now, not in the past, the place where the heroes and gods dwell and their deeds take place.

  The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind, the creator deity. If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it might seem irrational, since it would not belong. But Fat, having reversed everything, saw the rational breaking into the irrational. The immortal plasmate had invaded our world and the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not. This structure forms the basis o
f Fat’s world-view. It is the bottom line.

  For two thousand years the single rational element in our world had slumbered. In 1945 it woke up, came out of its dormant seed state and began to grow. It grew within himself, and presumably within other humans, and it grew outside, in the macro-world. He could not estimate its vastness, as I have said. When something begins to devour the world, a serious matter is taking place. If the devouring entity is evil or insane, the situation is not merely serious; it is grim. But Fat viewed the process the other way around. He viewed it exactly as Plato had viewed it in his own cosmology: the rational mind {noös) persuades the irrational (chance, blind determinism, ananke) into cosmos.

  This process had been interrupted by the Empire.

  ‘The Empire never ended.’ Until now; until August 1974 when the Empire suffered a crippling, perhaps terminal, blow, at the hands – so to speak – of the immortal plasmate, now restored to active form and using humans as its physical agents.

  Horselover Fat was one of those agents. He was, so to speak, the hands of the plasmate, reaching out to injure the Empire.

  Out of this, Fat deduced that he had a mission, that the plasmate’s invasion of him represented its intention to employ him for its benign purposes.

  I have had dreams of another place myself, a lake up north and the cottages and small rural houses around its south shore. In my dream I arrive there from Southern California, where I live; this is a vacation spot, but it is very old-fashioned. All the houses are wooden, made of the brown shingles so popular in California before World War Two. The roads are dusty. The cars are older, too. What is strange is that no such lake exists in the northern part of California. In real life I have driven all the way north to the Oregon border and into Oregon itself. Seven hundred miles of dry country exists only.

  Where does this lake – and the houses and roads around it – actually exist? Countless times I dream about it. Since in the dreams I am aware that I am on vacation, that my real home is in southern California, I sometimes drive back down here to Orange County in these interconnected dreams. But when I arrive back down here I live in a house, whereas in actuality I live in an apartment. In the dreams, I am married. In real life, I live alone. Stranger still, my wife is a woman I have never actually seen.

  In one dream, the two of us are outside in the back yard watering and tending our rose garden. I can see the house next door; it’s a mansion, and we share a common cement retaining wall with it. Wild roses have been planted up the side of the wall, to make it attractive. As I carry my rake past the green plastic garbage cans which we have stuffed with the clippings of trimmed plants, I glance at my wife – she is watering with the hose – and I gaze up at the retaining wall with its wild rose bushes, and I feel good; I think, It wouldn’t be possible to live happily in southern California if we didn’t have this nice house with its beautiful back garden. I’d prefer to own the mansion next door, but anyhow I get to see it, and I can walk over into its more spacious garden. My wife wears blue jeans; she is slender and pretty.

  As I wake up I think, I should drive north to the lake; as beautiful as it is down here, with my wife and the back garden and the wild roses, the lake is nicer. But then I realize that this is January and there will be snow on the highway when I get north of the Bay Area; this is not a good time to drive back to the cabin on the lake. I should wait until summer; I am really, after all, a rather timid driver. My car’s a good one, though; a nearly new red Capri. And then as I wake up more I realize that I am living in an apartment in southern California alone. I have no wife. There is no such house, with the back garden and the high retaining wall with wild rose bushes. Stranger still, not only do I not have a cabin on the lake up north but no such lake in California exists. The map I hold mentally during my dream is a counterfeit map; it does not depict California. Then what state does it depict? Washington? There is a large body of water at the north of Washington; I have flown over it going to and returning from Canada, and once I visited Seattle.

  Who is this wife? Not only am I single; I have never been married to nor seen this woman. Yet in the dreams I felt deep, comfortable and familiar love toward her, the kind of love which grows only with the passage of many years. But how do I even know that, since I have never had anyone to feel such love for?

  Getting up from bed – I’ve been napping in the early evening – I walk into the living room of my apartment and am struck dumb by the synthetic nature of my life. Stereo (that’s synthetic); television set (that’s certainly synthetic); books, a second-hand experience, at least compared with driving up the narrow, dusty road which follows the lake, passing under the branches of trees, finally reaching my cabin and the place I park. What cabin? What lake? I can even remember being taken there originally, years ago, by my mother. Now, sometimes, I go by air. There’s a direct flight between southern California and the lake ... except for a few miles after the airfield. What airfield? But, most of all, how can I endure the ersatz life I lead here in this plastic apartment, alone, specifically without her, the slender wife in blue jeans?

  If it wasn’t for Horselover Fat and his encounter with God or Zebra or the Logos, and this other person living in Fat’s head but in another century and place, I would dismiss my dreams as nothing. I can remember articles dealing with the people who have settled near the lake; they belong to a mild religious group, somewhat like the Quakers (I was raised as a Quaker); except, it is stated, they held the strong belief that children should not be put in wooden cradles. This was their special heretical thrust. Also – and I can actually see the pages of the written article about them – it is said of them that ‘every now and then one or two wizards are born,’ which has some bearing on their aversion to wooden cradles; if you put an infant or baby who is a wizard – a future wizard – into a wooden cradle, evidently he will gradually lose his powers.

  Dreams of another life? But where? Gradually the envisioned map of California, which is spurious, fades out, and, with it, the lake, the houses, the roads, the people, the cars, the airport, the clan of mild religious believers with their peculiar aversion to wooden cradles; but for this to fade out, a host of inter-connected dreams spanning years of real elapsed time must fade, too.

  The only connection between this dream landscape and my actual world consists of my red Capri.

  Why does that one element hold true in both worlds?

  It has been said of dreams that they are a ‘controlled psychosis,’ or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours. What does this mean in terms of my lake dream which includes a woman I never knew for whom I feel a real and comfortable love? Are there two persons in my brain, as there are in Fat’s? Partitioned off, but, in my case no disinhibiting symbol accidentally triggered the ‘other’ one into bursting through the partition into my personality and my world?

  Are we all like Horselover Fat, but don’t know it?

  How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?

  Groggy from my nap I turn on the TV and try to watch a program called ‘Dick Clark’s Good Ol’ Days Part II.’ Morons and simps appear in the screen, drool like pinheads and waterheads; zitfaced kids scream in ecstatic approval of total banality. I turn the TV set off. My cat wants to be fed. What cat? In the dreams, my wife and I own no pets; we own a lovely house with a large, well-tended yard in which we spend our weekends. We have a two-car garage ... suddenly I realize with a distinct jolt that this is an expensive house; in my inter-related dreams I am well-to-do. I live an upper-middleclass life. It’s not me. I’d never live like that; or if I did I’d be acutely uncomfortable. Wealth and property make me uneasy; I grew up in Berkeley and have the typical Berkeley left wing socialist conscience, with its suspicion of the cushy life.

  The person in the dream also owns lake-front property. But the goddam Capri is the same. Earlier this year I went out and bought a brand new Capri Ghia, which normally I can’t afford; it is the kind of car the person in the dream would ow
n. There is a logic to the dream, then. As that person I would have the same car.

  An hour after I have woken up from the dream I can still see in my mind’s eye – whatever that may be; the third or ajna eye? – the garden hose which my wife in her blue jeans is dragging across the cement driveway. Little details, and no plot. I wish I owned the mansion next to our house. I do? In real life, I wouldn’t own a mansion on a bet. These are rich people; I detest them. Who am I? How many people am I? Where am I? This plastic little apartment in southern California is not my home, but now I am awake, I guess, and here I live, with my TV (hello, Dick Clark), and my stereo (hello, Olivia Newton-John) and my books (hello nine million stuffy titles). In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person. Where are the roses? Where is the lake? Where is the slim, smiling, attractive woman coiling and tugging the green garden hose? The person that I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

  Then a strange thought comes to me. I am not close to my father, who is still alive, in his eighties, living up in northern California, in Menlo Park. Only twice did I ever visit his house, and that was twenty years ago. His house was like that which I owned in the dream. His aspirations – and accomplishments – dovetail with those of the person in the dream. Do I become my father during my sleep? The man in the dream – myself – was about my own actual age, or younger. Yes; I infer from the woman, my wife: much younger. I have gone back in time in my dreams, not back to my own youth but back to my father’s youth! In my dreams, I hold my father’s view of the good life, of what things should be like; the strength of his view is so strong that it lingers an hour after I wake up. Of course I felt dislike for my cat upon awakening; my father hates cats.