Valis

  ‘Cheap shot.’

  ‘Well, so the barefoot woman was back in Roman times. I saw something tonight in Valis I didn’t see before that I didn’t mention; I didn’t want Fat to fizzle around the room like a firecracker. In the background while the woman was by the creek, you could see indistinct shapes. Your still-photographer friend Jamison probably did that. Shapes of buildings. Ancient buildings, from, say, around Roman times. It looked like clouds, but – there are clouds and there are clouds. The first time I saw it I saw clouds and the second time – today – I saw buildings. Does the goddam film change every time you see it? Holy fuck; what a thought! A different film each time. No, that’s impossible.’

  I said, ‘So is a beam of pink light that transfers medical information to your brain about your son’s birth defect.’

  ‘What if I told you that there may have been a time dysfunction in 1974, and the ancient Roman world broke through into our world?’

  ‘You mean as the theme in the film.’

  ‘No, I mean really.’

  ‘In the real world?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That would explain “Thomas”.’

  Kevin nodded.

  ‘Broke through,’ I said, ‘and then separated again.’

  ‘Leaving Richard Nixon walking along a beach in California in his suit and tie wondering what happened.’

  ‘Then it was purposeful.’

  ‘The dysfunction? Sure.’

  ‘Then it’s not a dysfunction we’re talking about; we’re talking about someone or something deliberately manipulating time.’

  ‘You got it,’ Kevin said.

  I said, ‘You’ve sure gone 180 degrees away from the “Fat is crazy” theory.’

  ‘Well, Nixon is still walking along a beach in California wondering what happened. The first US President ever to be forced out of office. The most powerful man in the world. Which made him in effect the most powerful man who ever lived. You know why the President in Valis was named Ferris F. Fremount? I figured it out. “F” is the sixth letter of the English alphabet. So F equals six. So FFF, Ferris F. Fremount’s initials, are in numerical terms 666. That’s why Goose called him that’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That makes these the Final Days.’

  ‘Well, Fat’s convinced the Savior is about to return or has already returned. The inner voice he heard that he identifies with Zebra or God – it told him so in several ways. St Sophia – which is Christ – and the Buddha and Apollo. And it told him something like, “The time you’ve waited for– “ ‘

  ‘ “ – has now come”,’ I finished.

  ‘This is heavy shit,’ Kevin said. ‘We’ve got Elijah walking around, another John the Baptist, saying, “Make straight in the desert a highway for our Lord.” Freeway, maybe.’ He laughed.

  Suddenly I remembered something I had seen in Valis; it came into my mind visually: a tight shot of the car which Fremount at the end of the film, Fremount re-elected but actually now Nicholas Brady, had emerged from to address the crowd. ‘Thunderbird,’ I said.

  ‘Wine?’

  ‘Car. Ford car. Ford.’

  ‘Ah, shit,’ Kevin said. ‘You’re right. He got out of a Ford Thunderbird and he was Brady. Jerry Ford.’

  ‘It could have been a coincidence.’

  ‘In Valis nothing was a coincidence. And they zoomed in on the car where the metal thing read Ford. How much else is there in Valis that we didn’t pick up on? Pick up on consciously. There’s no telling what it’s doing to our unconscious minds; the goddam film may be –’ Kevin grimaced. ‘Firing all kinds of information at us, visually and auditorily. I’ve got to make a tape of the sound track of that flick; I’ve got to get a tape recorder in there the next time I see it. Which’ll be in the next couple of days.’

  ‘What kinds of music are on the Mini LPs?’ I asked.

  ‘Sounds resembling the songs of the humpback whale.’

  I stared at him, not sure he was serious.

  ‘Really,’ he said. ‘In fact I did a tape going from whale noises to the Synchronicity Music and back again. There’s an eerie continuity; I mean, you can tell the difference, but –’

  ‘How does the Synchronicity Music affect you? What sort of mood does it put you in?’

  Kevin said, ‘A deep theta state, deep sleep. But I personally had visions.’

  ‘Of what? Three-eyed people?’

  ‘No,’ Kevin said. ‘Of an ancient Celtic sacred ceremony. A ram being roasted and sacrificed to cause winter to go away and spring to return.’ Glancing at me he said, ‘Racially, I’m Celtic’

  ‘Did you know about these myths before?’

  ‘No. I was one of the participants in the sacrifice; I cut the ram’s throat. I remembered being there.’

  Kevin, listening to Mini’s Synchronicity Music, had gone back in time to his origins.

  1Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Doubleday, 1968.

  2The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Doubleday, 1964.

  3The Man in the High Castle, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

  Chapter 10

  It would not be in China, nor in India or Tasmania for that matter, that Horselover Fat would find the fifth Savior. Valis had shown us where to look: a beer can run over by a passing taxi. That was the source of the information and the help.

  That in fact was VALIS, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, as Mother Goose had chosen to term it.

  We had just saved Fat a lot of money, plus a lot of wasted time and effort, including the bother of obtaining vaccinations and a passport.

  A couple of days later the three of us drove up Tustin Avenue and took in the film Valis once more. Watching it carefully I realized that on the surface the movie made no sense whatsoever. Unless you ferreted out the subliminal and marginal clues and assembled them all together you arrived at nothing. But these clues got fired at your head whether you consciously considered them and their meaning or not; you had no choice. The audience was in the same relationship to the film Valis that Fat had had to what he called Zebra: a transducer and a percipient, totally receptive in nature.

  Again we found mostly teenagers comprising the audience. They seemed to enjoy what they saw. I wondered how many of them left the theater pondering the inscrutable mysteries of the film as we did. Maybe none of them. I had a feeling it made no difference.

  We could assign Gloria’s death as the cause of Fat’s supposed encounter with God, but we could not consider it the cause of the film Valis. Kevin, upon first seeing the film, had realized this at once. It didn’t matter what the explanation was; what had now been established was that Fat’s March 1974 experience was real.

  Okay; it mattered what the explanation was. But at least one thing had been proved: Fat might be clinically crazy but he was locked into reality-a reality of some kind, although certainly not the normal one.

  Ancient Rome – apostolic times and early Christians – breaking through into the modern world. And breaking through with a purpose. To unseat Ferris F. Fremount, who was Richard Nixon.

  They had achieved their purpose, and had gone back home.

  Maybe the Empire had ended after all.

  Now himself somewhat persuaded, Kevin began to comb through the two apocalyptic books of the Bible for clues. He came across a part of the Book of Daniel which he believed depicted Nixon.

  In the last days of those kingdoms,

  When their sin is at its height,

  A king shall appear, harsh and grim, a master of stratagem.

  His power shall be great, he shall work havoc untold;

  He shall work havoc among great nations and upon a holy people.

  His mind shall be ever active,

  And he shall succeed in his crafty designs;

  He shall conjure up great plans.

  And, when they least expect it, work havoc on many.

  He shall challenge even the Prince of princes

  And b
e broken, but not by human hands.

  Now Kevin had become a Bible scholar, to Fat’s amusement; the cynic had become devout, albeit for a particular purpose.

  But on a far more fundamental level Fat felt fear at the turn of events. Perhaps he had always felt reassured to think that his March 1974 encounter with God emanated from mere insanity; viewing it that way he did not necessarily have to take it as real. Now he did. We all did. Something which did not yield up an explanation had happened to Fat, an experience which pointed to a melting of the physical world itself, and to the ontological categories which defined it: space and time.

  ‘Shit, Phil,’ he said to me that night ‘What if the world doesn’t exist? If it doesn’t, then what does?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and then I said, quoting, ‘You’re the authority.’

  Fat glared at me. ‘It’s not funny. Some force or entity melted the reality around me as if everything was a hologram! An interference with our hologram!’

  ‘But in your tractate.’ I said, ‘that’s exactly what you stipulate reality is: a two-source hologram.’

  ‘But intellectually thinking it is one thing,’ Fat said, ‘and finding out it’s true is another!’

  ‘There’s no use getting sore at me,’ I said.

  David, our Catholic friend, and his teeny-bopper underage girlfriend Jan went to see Valis, on our recommendation. David came out of it pleased. He saw the hand of God squeezing the world like an orange.

  ‘Yeah, well we’re in the juice,’ Fat said.

  ‘But that’s the way it should be,’ David said.

  ‘You’re willing to dispense with the whole world as a real thing, then,’ Fat said.

  ‘Whatever God believes in is real,’ David said.

  Kevin, irked, said, ‘Can he create a person so gullible that he’ll believe nothing exists? Because if nothing exists, what is meant by the word “nothing”? How is one “nothing” which exists defined in comparison to another “nothing” which doesn’t exist?’

  We, as usual, had gotten caught in the crossfire between David and Kevin, but under altered circumstances.

  ‘What exists,’ David said, ‘is God and the Will of God.’

  ‘I hope I’m in his will,’ Kevin said. ‘I hope he left me more than one dollar.’

  ‘All creatures are in his will,’ David said, not batting an eye; he never let Kevin get to him.

  Concern had now, by gradual increments, overcome our little group. We were no longer friends comforting and propping up a deranged member; we were collectively in deep trouble. A total reversal had in fact taken place: instead of mollifying Fat we now had to turn to him for advice. Fat was our link with that entity, VALIS or Zebra, which appeared to have power over all of us, if the Mother Goose film were to be believed.

  ‘Not only does it fire information to us but when it wants to it can take control. It can override us.’

  That expressed it perfectly. At any moment a beam of pink light could strike us, blind us, and when we regained our sight (if we ever did) we could know everything or nothing and be in Brazil four thousand years ago; space and time, for VALIS, meant nothing.

  A common worry unified all of us, the fear that we knew or had figured out too much. We knew that apostolic Christians armed with stunningly sophisticated technology had broken through the space-time barrier into our world, and, with the aid of a vast information-processing instrument had basically deflected human history. The species of creature which stumbles onto such knowledge may not show up too well on the longevity tables.

  Most ominous of all, we knew – or suspected – that the original apostolic Christians who had known Christ, who had been alive to receive the direct oral teachings before the Romans wiped those teachings out, were immortal. They had acquired immortality through the plasmate which Fat had discussed in his tractate. Although the original apostolic Christians had been murdered, the plasmate had gone into hiding at Nag Hammadi and was again loose in our world, and as angry as a motherfucker, if you’ll excuse the expression. It thirsted for vengeance. And apparently it had begun to score that vengeance, against the modern-day manifestation of the Empire, the imperial United States Presidency.

  I hoped the plasmate considered us its friends. I hoped it didn’t think we were snitches.

  ‘Where do we hide,’ Kevin said, ‘when an immortal plasmate which knows everything and is consuming the world by transubstantiation is looking for you?’

  ‘It’s a good thing Sherri isn’t alive to hear about all this,’ Fat said, surprising us. ‘I mean, it would shake her faith.’

  We all laughed. Faith shaken by the discovery that the entity believed in actually existed – the paradox of piety. Sherri’s theology had congealed; there would have been no room in it for the growth, the expansion and evolution, necessary to encompass our revelations. No wonder Fat and she weren’t able to live together.

  The question was, How did we go about making contact with Eric Lampton and Linda Lampton and the composer of Synchronicity Music, Mini? Obviously through me and my friendship – if that’s what it was – with Jamison.

  ‘It’s up to you, Phil,’ Kevin said. ‘Get off the pot and onto the stick. Call Jamison and tell him – whatever. You’re full of it; you’ll think of something. Say you’ve written a hot-property screenplay and you want Lampton to read it.’

  ‘Call it Zebra; Fat said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll call it Zebra or Horse’s Ass or anything you want. You know, of course, that this is going to shoot down my professional probity.’

  ‘What probity?’ Kevin said, characteristically. ‘Your probity is like Fat’s. It never got off the ground in the first place.’

  ‘What you have to do,’ Fat said, ‘is show knowledge of the gnosis disclosed to me by Zebra over and above, which is to say beyond, what appears in Valis. That will intrigue him. I’ll write down a few statements I’ve received directly from Zebra.’

  Presently he had a list for me.

  #18. Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the foil of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. The Empire never ended,’ but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the Happy (or Rightful) King.

  #19. The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX was not intended for human beings but for the descendents of Ikhnaton, the three-eyed race which, in secret, exists with us.

  Reading these entries, I said, ‘I’m supposed to recite this to Robin Jamison?’

  ‘Say they’re from your screenplay Zebra,’ Kevin said.

  ‘Is this cypher real?’ I asked Fat

  A veiled expression appeared on his face. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘This two-word secret message was actually sent out?’ David said.

  ‘In 1974,’ Fat said. ‘In February. The United States Army cryptographers studied it, but couldn’t discern who it was intended for or what it meant’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I said.

  ‘Zebra told him,’ Kevin said.

  ‘No,’ Fat said, but he did not amplify.

  In this industry you always talk to agents, never to principals. One time I had gotten loaded and tried to get hold of Kay Lenz, who I had a crush on from having seen Breezy. Her agent cut me off at the pass. The same thing happened when I tried to get through to Victoria Principal, who herself is now an agent; again, I had a crush on her and again I was ripped when I started phoning Universal Studios. But having Robin Jamison’s address and phone number in London made a difference.

  ‘Yes, I remember you,’ Jamison said pleasantly when I put the call through to London. ‘The science fiction writer with the child bride, as Mr Purser described her in his article.’

  I told him about my dynamite screenplay Zebra and that I’d seen their sensational film Valis and thought that Mother Goose was absolutely perfect for the lead part; even
more so than Robert Redford, who we were also considering and who was interested.

  ‘What I can do,’ Jamison said, ‘is contact Mr Lampton and give him your number there in the States. If he’s interested he or his agent will get in touch with you or your agent’

  I’d fired my best shot; that was it.

  After some more talk I hung up, feeling futile. Also I had a minor twinge of guilt over my devious hype, but I knew that the twinge would abate.

  Was Eric Lampton the fifth Savior who Fat sought?

  Strange, the relationship between the actuality and the ideal. Fat had been prepared to climb the highest mountain in Tibet, to reach a two-hundred-year-old monk who would say, ‘The meaning of it all, my son, is –’ I thought, Here, my son, time turns into space. But I said nothing; Fat’s circuits were already overloaded with information. The last thing he needed was more information; what Fat needed was someone to take the information from him.

  ‘Is Goose in the States?’ Kevin said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘according to Jamison.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him the cypher,’ Fat said.

  We all gave Fat a withering look.

  ‘The cypher is for Goose,’ Kevin said. ‘When he calls.’

  ‘ “When”,’ I echoed.

  ‘If you have to you can have your agent contact Goose’s agent,’ Kevin said. He had become more earnest about this than even Fat himself. After all, it was Kevin who had discovered Valis and thereby put us in business.

  ‘A film like that,’ David said, ‘is going to bring a lot of cranks out of the woodwork. Mother Goose is probably being rather careful.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Kevin said.

  ‘I don’t mean us,’ David said.

  ‘He’s right,’ I said, reviewing in my mind some of the mail my own writing generates. ‘Goose will probably prefer to contact my agent.’ I thought, If he contacts us at all. His agent to my agent. Balanced minds.

  ‘If Goose does phone you,’ Fat said to me in a calm, low, very tense voice, unusual for him, ‘you are to give him the two-word cypher, KING FELIX. Work it into the conversation, of course; this isn’t spy stuff. Say it’s an alternate title for the screenplay.’