‘That’s the DNA molecule,’ I said.
‘Right,’ Kevin said, grinning. ‘In the form of a repeated design running around the top of the pitcher.’
We all remained silent for a time and then I said, ‘DNA memory. Gene-pool memory.’
‘Right,’ Kevin said. He added, ‘At the creek when she fills the pitcher –’
‘ “She”?’ Fat said. ‘Who was she?’
‘A woman,’ Kevin said. ‘We never see her again. We never even see her face but she has on a long, old-fashioned dress and she’s barefoot. Where she’s filling the pot or the pitcher, there’s a man fishing. It’s flash-cut, just for a fraction of an instant. But he’s there. That’s why you thought you saw the fish sign. Because you picked up the sight of the man fishing. There may even have been fish lying beside him in a heap; I’ll have to look really hard at that when I see it again. You saw the man subliminally and your brain – your right hemisphere – connected it with the double helix design on the pitcher.’
‘The satellite,’ Fat said. ‘VALIS. Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It fires information down to them?’
‘It does more than that,’ Kevin said. ‘Under certain circumstances it controls them. It can override them when it wants to.’
‘And they’re trying to shoot it down?’ I said. ‘With that missile?’
Kevin said, ‘The early Christians – the real ones-can make you do anything they want you to do. And see – or not see – anything. That’s what I get out of the picture.’
‘But they’re dead,’ I said. ‘The picture was set in the present.’
‘They’re dead,’ Kevin said, ‘if you believe time is real. Didn’t you see the time dysfunctions?’
‘No,’ both Fat and I said in unison.
‘That dry barren field. That was the parking lot Brady ran across to get into his car when the two men in black were stationed and ready to shoot him.’
I hadn’t realized that. ‘How do you know?’ I said.
‘There was a tree,’ Kevin said. ‘Both times.’
‘I saw no tree,’ Fat said.
‘Well, we’ll all have to go see the picture again,’ Kevin said. ‘I’m going to; ninety percent of the details are designed to go by you the first time – actually only go by your conscious mind; they register in your unconscious. I’d like to study the film frame by frame.’
I said, ‘Then the Christian fish sign is Crick and Watson’s double helix. The DNA molecule where genetic memory is stored; Mother Goose wanted to make that point. That’s why –’
‘Christians,’ Kevin agreed. ‘Who aren’t human beings but something without sex organs designed to look like human beings, but on closer inspection they are human beings; they do have sex organs and they make love.’
‘Even if their skulls are full of electronic chips instead of brains,’ I said.
‘Maybe they’re immortal,’ Fat said.
‘That’s why Linda Lampton is able to put her husband back together,’ I said. ‘When Brady’s mixer blew him up. They can travel backward in time.’
Kevin, not smiling, said, ‘Right. So now can you see why I wanted you to see Valis?’ he said to Fat.
‘Yes,’ Fat said, somberly, in deep introspection.
‘How could Linda Lampton walk through the wall of the mixer?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘Maybe she wasn’t really there or maybe the mixer wasn’t there; maybe she was a hologram.’
‘A hologram,’ Fat echoed.
Kevin said, ‘The satellite had control of them from the get-go. It could make them see what it wanted them to see; at the end, where it turns out that Fremount is Brady – no one notices! His own wife doesn’t notice. The satellite has occluded them, all of them. The whole fucking United States.’
‘Christ,’ I said; that hadn’t dawned on me yet, but the realization had been coming.
‘Right,’ Kevin said. ‘We see Brady, but obviously they don’t; they don’t realize what’s happened. It’s a power struggle between Brady and his electronic know-how and equipment, and Fremount and his secret police – the men in black are the secret police. And those broads who looked like cheerleaders – they’re something, on Fremount’s side, but I don’t know what. I’ll figure it out next time.’ His voice rose. ‘There’s information in Mini’s music; as we watch the events on the screen the music – Christ, it isn’t music; it’s certain pitches at specific intervals – unconsciously cues us. The music is what makes the thing into sense.’
‘Could that huge mixer actually be something that Mini really built?’ I asked.
‘Maybe so,’ Kevin said. ‘Mini has a degree from MIT.’
‘What else do you know about him?’ Fat said.
‘Not very much,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s English. He visited the Soviet Union one time; he said he wanted to see certain experiments they were conducting with microwave information transfer over long distances. Mini developed a system where –’
‘I just realized something,’ I broke in. ‘On the credits, Robin Jamison who did the still photography. I know him. He took photos of me to go with an interview I did for the London Daily Telegraph. He told me he covered the coronation; he’s one of the top still photographers in the world. He said he was moving his family to Vancouver; he said it’s the most beautiful city in the world.’
‘It is,’ Fat said.
‘Jamison gave me his card,’ I said. ‘So I could write to him for the negatives after the interview was published.’
Kevin said, ‘He would know Linda and Eric Lampton. And maybe Mini, too.’
‘He told me to contact him,’ I said. ‘He was very nice; he sat for a long time and talked to me. He had motor-driven cameras; the noise fascinated my cats. And he let me look through a wide-angle lens; it was beyond belief, the lenses he had.’
‘Who put up the satellite?’ Fat said. ‘The Russians?’
‘It’s never made clear,’ Kevin said. ‘But the way they talk about it... it didn’t suggest the Russians. There’s that one scene where Fremount is opening a letter with an antique letter-opener; all of a sudden you have that montage – antique letter-opener and then the military talking about the satellite. If you fuse the two together, you get the idea – I got the idea – the satellite is real old.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘The time dysfunction, the woman in the old-fashioned long dress, barefoot, dipping water from the creek with a clay pitcher. There was a shot of the sky; did you notice that, Kevin?’
‘The sky,’ Kevin murmured. ‘Yes; it was a long shot. A panorama shot. Sky, the field ... the field looks old. Like maybe in the Near East Like in Syria. And you’re right; the pitcher reinforces that impression.’
I said, ‘The satellite is never seen.’
‘Wrong,’ Kevin said.
‘Wrong?’ I said.
‘Five times,’ Kevin said. ‘It appears once as a picture on a wall calendar. Once briefly as a child’s toy in a store window. Once in the sky, but it’s a flash-cut; I missed it the first time. Once in diagram form when President Fremount is going through that packet of data and photos on the Meritone Record Company... I forget the fifth time, now.’ He frowned.
‘The object the taxi runs over,’ I said.
‘What?’ Kevin said. ‘Oh yeah; the taxi speeding along West Alameda. I thought it was a beer can. It rattled off loudly into the gutter.’ He reflected, then nodded. ‘You’re right. It was the satellite again, mashed up by being run over. It sounded like a beer can; mat’s what fooled me. Mini again; his damn music or noises – whatever. You hear the sound of a beer can so automatically you see a beer can.’ His grin became stark. ‘Hear it so you see it. Not bad.’ Although he was driving in heavy traffic he shut his eyes a moment. ‘Yeah, it’s mashed up. But it’s the satellite; it has those antennae, but they’re broken and bent. And – shit! There’re words written on it. Like a label. What do the words say? You know, you’d have to take a fucking magnifying
glass and go over stills from the flick, single-frame stills. One by one by one by one. And do some superimpositions. We’re getting retinal lag; it’s done through the lasers Brady uses. The light is so bright that it leaves –’ Kevin paused.
‘Phosphene activity,’ I said. ‘In the retinas of the audience. That’s what you mean. That’s why lasers play such a role in the film.’
‘Okay,’ Kevin said, when we had returned to Fat’s apartment. Each of us sat with a bottle of Dutch beer, kicking back and ready to figure it all out.
The material in the Mother Goose flick overlapped with Fat’s encounter with God. That’s the plain truth. I’d say, ‘That’s God’s truth,’ but I don’t think – I certainly didn’t think then – that God had anything to do with it.
‘The Great Punta works in wonderful ways,’ Kevin said, but not in a kidding tone of voice. ‘Fuck. Holy fuck.’ To Fat he said, ‘I just assumed you were crazy. I mean, you’re in and out of the rubber lock-up.’
‘Cool it,’ I said.
‘So I take in Valis,’ Kevin said, ‘I go to the movies to get away for a little while from all this nutso garbage that Fat here lays on us; there I am sitting in the goddam theater watching a sci-fi flick with Mother Goose in it, and what do I see. It’s like a conspiracy.’
‘Don’t blame me,’ Fat said.
Kevin said to him, ‘You’re going to have to meet Goose.’
‘How’m I going to do that?’ Fat said.
‘Phil will contact Jamison. You can meet Goose – Eric Lampton – through Jamison; Phil’s a famous writer – he can arrange it.’ To me, Kevin said, ‘You have any books currently optioned to any movie producer?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?1 and also Three Stigmata.2,
‘Fine,’ Kevin said. ‘Then Phil can say maybe there’s a film in it.’ Turning to me he said, ‘Who’s that producer friend of yours? The one at MGM?’
‘Stan Jaffly,’ I said.
‘Are you still in touch with him?’
‘Only on a personal basis. They let their option on Man in the High Castle3 lapse. He writes to me sometimes; he sent me a huge kit of herb seeds one time. He was going to send me a huge bag of peatmoss later on but fortunately he never did.’
‘Get in touch with him,’ Kevin said.
‘Look,’ Fat said. ‘I don’t understand. There were -’ He gestured. ‘Things in Valis that happened to me in March of 1974. When I –’ Again he gestured and fell silent, a perplexed expression on his face. Almost an expression of suffering, I noticed. I wondered why.
Maybe Fat felt that it reduced the stature of his encounter with God – with Zebra – to discover elements of it cropping up in a sci-fi movie starring a rock figure named Mother Goose. But this was the first hard evidence we had had that anything existed, here; and it had been Kevin, who could disintegrate a scam with a single bound, that had brought it to our attention.
‘How many elements did you recognize?’ I said, as quietly and calmly as I could, to the dejected-looking Horselover Fat.
After a time, Fat pulled himself erect in his chair and said, ‘Okay.’
‘Write them down,’ Kevin said; he brought out a fountain pen. Kevin always used fountain pens, the last of a vanishing breed of noble men. ‘Paper?’ he said, glancing around.
When paper had been brought, Fat began the list. ‘The third eye with the lateral lens.’
‘Okay.’ Nodding, Kevin wrote that down.
“The pink light.’
Okay.’
‘The Christian fish sign. Which I didn’t see, but which you say was –’
‘Double helix,’ Kevin said.
‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘Apparently.’
‘Anything else?’ Kevin asked Fat.
‘Well, the whole goddam information transfer. From VALIS. From the satellite. You say it not only fires information to them but it overrides them and controls them.’
‘That,’ Kevin said, ‘was the whole point of the film. The satellite took – look; here’s what the picture was about. There is this tyrant obviously based on Richard Nixon called Ferris F. Fremount. He rules the USA through those black secret police, I mean, men in black uniforms carrying scope-sight weapons, and those fucking cheerleader broads. They’re called “Fappers” in the film.’
‘I didn’t get that,’ I said, ‘when I saw it.’
‘It was on a banner,’ Kevin said. ‘Marginally. Fappers -”Friends of the American People.” Ferris Fremount’s citizen army. All alike and all patriotic. Anyhow, the satellite fires beams of information and saves Brady’s life. You did get that. Finally the satellite arranges for Brady to replace Fremount at the very end when Fremount has won re-election. It’s really Brady who’s president, not Fremount. And Fremount knows; there was the scene of him with the dossier of pictures of the people at Meritone Records; he knew what was happening but he couldn’t stop it. He gave orders for the military to bring down VALIS but the missile wobbled and had to be destroyed. Everything was done by VALIS. Where do you think Brady got his electronics knowledge in the first place? From VALIS. So when Brady became president as Ferris Fremount, it was really the satellite which became president. Now, who or what is the satellite? Who or what is VALIS? The clue is the ceramic pot or the ceramic pitcher; same thing. The fish sign – which your brain has to assemble from separate pieces of information. Fish sign, Christians. Old-fashioned dress on the woman. Time dysfunction. There is some connection between VALIS and the early Christians, but I can’t make out what. Anyhow, the film alludes to it elliptically. Everything is in pieces, all the information. For example, when Ferris Fremount is reading the dossier on Meritone Records – did you have time to scan any of the data?’
‘No,’ Fat and I said.
‘ “He lived a long time ago”,’ Kevin said hoarsely,’ “but he is still alive”.’
‘It said that?’ Fat said.
‘Yes!’ Kevin said. ‘It said that.’
‘Then I’m not the only one who encountered God,’ Fat said.
‘Zebra,’ Kevin corrected him. ‘You don’t know it was God; you don’t know what the fuck it was.’
‘A satellite?’ I said. ‘A very old information-firing satellite?’
Irritably, Kevin said, ‘They wanted to make a sci-fi flick; that’s how you would handle it in a sci-fi flick if you had such an experience. You ought to know that, Phil. Isn’t that so, Phil?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘So they call it VALIS,’ Kevin said, ‘and make it an ancient satellite. That’s controlling people to remove an evil tyranny that grips the United States – obviously based on Richard Nixon.’
I said, ‘Are we to assume that the film Valis is telling us that Zebra or God or VALIS or three-eyed people from Sirius removed Nixon from office?’
‘Yep,’ Kevin said.
To Fat, I said, ‘Didn’t the three-eyed Sibyl you dreamed about talk about “conspirators who had been seen and would be taken care of”?’
‘In August 1974,’ Fat said.
Kevin, harshly, said, ‘That’s the month and year Nixon resigned.’
Later, as Kevin was driving me home, the two of us talked about Fat and about Valis, since presumably neither of them could overhear us.
The opinion Kevin copped to was that all along he had taken it for granted that Fat was simply crazy. He had seen the situation this way: guilt and sorrow over Gloria’s suicide had destroyed Fat’s mind and he had never recovered. Beth was a tremendous bitch, and, married to her out of desperation, Fat had become even more miserable. At last, in 1974, he had totally lost it. Fat had begun a lurid schizophrenic episode to liven up his drab life: he had seen pretty colors and heard comforting words, all generated out of his unconscious which had risen up and literally swamped him, wiping out his ego. In that psychotic state Fat had flailed around, deriving great solace from his ‘encounter with God,’ as he had imagined it to be. For Fat, total psychosis was a mercy. No longer in touch
with reality in any way, shape or form, Fat could believe that Christ Himself held Fat in his arms, comforting him. But then Kevin had gone to the movies and now he was not so sure; the Mother Goose flick had shaken him up.
I wondered if Fat still intended to fly to China to find what he termed ‘the fifth Savior.’ It would seem that he need go no farther than Hollywood, where VALIS had been shot, or, if that was where he would find Eric and Linda Lampton, Burbank, the center of the American recording industry.
The fifth Savior: a rock star.
‘When was Valis made?’ I asked Kevin.
‘The film? Or the satellite?’
‘The film of course.’
Kevin said, ‘1977.’
‘And Fat’s experience took place in 1974.’
‘Right,’ Kevin said. ‘Probably before work began on the screenplay, from what I can piece together from reviews I’ve read on Valis. Goose says he wrote the screenplay in twelve days. He didn’t say exactly when, but apparently he wanted to go into production as soon as possible. I’m sure it was after 1974.’
‘But you really don’t know.’
Kevin said, ‘You can find that out from Jamison, the still photographer; he’d know.’
‘What if it happened at the same time? March 1974?’
‘Beats the fuck out of me,’ Kevin said.
‘You don’t think it really is an information satellite, do you?’ I said. ‘That fired a beam at Fat?’
‘No; that’s a sci-fi film device, a sci-fi way of explaining it.’ Kevin pondered. ‘I guess. But there were time dysfunctions in the film; Goose was aware that somehow time’s involved. That really is the only way you can understand the film ... the woman filling the pitcher. How’d Fat get that ceramic pot? Some broad gave it to him?’
‘Made it, fired it and gave it to him, around 1971 after his wife left him.’
‘Not Beth.’
‘No, some earlier wife.’
‘After Gloria’s death.’
‘Yes. Fat says God was sleeping in the pot and came out in March 1974 – the theophany.’
‘I know a lot of people who think God sleeps in pot,’ Kevin said.