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 knew 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 this 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 “Deserts 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 focused 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.
The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one—in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
In the midst of his shattered landscape, which one can trace back to Gloria Knudson’s death, Fat imagined God had cured him. Once you notice Pyrrhic victories they seem to abound.
It reminds me of a girl I once knew who was dying of cancer. I visited her in the hospital and did not recognize her; sitting up in her bed she looked like a little old hairless man. From the chemotherapy she had swollen up like a great grape. From the cancer and the therapy she had become virtually blind, nearly deaf, underwent constant seizures, and when I bent close to her to ask her how she felt she answered, when she could understand my question, “I feel that God is healing me.” She had been religiously inclined and had planned to go into a religious order. On the metal stand beside her bed she had, or someone had, laid out her rosary. In my opinion a FUCK YOU, GOD sign would have been appropriate; the rosary was not.
Yet in all fairness, I have to admit that God—or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics—had fired precious information at Horselover Fat’s head by which their son Christopher’s life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.” Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.
We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation because he always got angry, taking the point of view that what we said on the topic mattered—that the topic itself mattered. By now he had become totally whacked out. We enjoyed introducing the discussion by way of some careless comment: “Well, God gave me a ticket on the freeway today” or something like that. Ensnared, Fat would leap into action. We whiled away the time pleasantly in this fashion, torturing Fat in a benign way. After we left his place we had the added satisfaction of knowing he was writing it all down in the journal. Of course, in the journal his view always prevailed.
No need existed to bait Fat with idle questions, such as, “If God can do anything can he create a ditch so wide he can’t jump over it?” We had plenty of real questions that Fat couldn’t field. Our friend Kevin always began his attack one way. “What about my dead cat?” Kevin would ask. Several years ago, Kevin had been out walking his cat in the early evening. Kevin, the fool, had not put the cat on a leash, and the cat had dashed into the street and right into the front wheel of a passing car. When he picked up the remains of the cat it was still alive, breathing in bloody foam and staring at him in horror. Kevin liked to say, “On judgment day when I’m brought up before the great judge I’m going to say, ‘Hold on a second,’ and then I’m going to whip out my dead cat from inside my coat. ‘How do you explain this?’ I’m going to ask.” By then, Kevin used to say, the cat would be as stiff as a frying pan; he would hold out the cat by its handle, its tail, and wait for a satisfactory answer.
Fat said, “No answer would satisfy you.”
“No answer you could give,” Kevin sneered. “Okay, so God saved your son’s life; why didn’t he have my cat run out into the street five seconds later? Three seconds later? Would that have been too much trouble? Of course, I suppose a cat doesn’t matter.”
“You know, Kevin,” I pointed out one time, “you could have put the cat on a leash.”
“No,” Fat said. “He has a point. It’s been bothering me. For him the cat is a symbol of everything about the universe he doesn’t understand.”
“I understand fine,” Kevin said bitterly. “I just think it’s fucked. God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb and weak. I think I’ll start my own exegesis.”
“But God doesn’t talk to you,” I said.
“You know who talks to Horse?” Kevin said. “Who really talks to Horse in the middle of the night? People from the planet Stupid. Horse, what’s the wisdom of God called again? Saint what?”
“Hagia Sophia,” Horse said cautiously.
Kevin said, “How do you say Hagia Stupid? St. Stupid?”
“Hagia Moron,” Horse said. He always defended himself by giving in. “Moron is a Greek word like Hagia. I came across it when I was looking up the spelling of oxymoron.”
“Except that the -on suffix is the neuter ending,” I said.
That gives you an idea of where our theological arguments tended to wind up. Three malinformed people disagreeing with one another. We also had David our Roman Catholic friend and the girl who had been dying of cancer, Sherri. She had gone into remission and the hospital had discharged her. To some extent her hearing and vision were permanently impaired, but otherwise, she seemed to be fine.
Fat, of course, used this as an argument for God and God’s healing love, as did David and of course Sherri herself. Kevin saw her remission as a miracle of radiation therapy and chemotherapy and luck. Also, he confided to us, the remission was temporary. At any time, Sherri could get sick again. Kevin hinted darkly that the next time she got sick there wouldn’t be a remission. We sometimes thought that he hoped so, since it would confirm his view of the universe.
It was a mainstay of Kevin’s bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment. The universe reeled you out, let you flop and thrash and then reeled you in. Kevin waited constantly for this to begin with him, with me, with David and especially with Sherri. As to Horselover Fat, Kevin believed that th
e line hadn’t been payed out in years; Fat had long been in the part of the cycle where they reel you back in. He considered Fat not just potentially doomed but doomed in fact.
Fat had the good sense not to discuss Gloria Knudson and her death in front of Kevin. Had he done so, Kevin would add her to his dead cat. He would be talking about whipping her out from under his coat on judgment day, along with the cat.
Being a Catholic, David always traced everything wrong back to man’s free will. This used to annoy even me. I once asked him if Sherri getting cancer consisted of an instance of free will, knowing as I did that David kept up with all the latest news in the field of psychology and would make the mistake of claiming that Sherri had subconsciously wanted to get cancer and so had shut down her immune system, a view floating around in advanced psychological circles at that time. Sure enough, David fell for it and said so.
“Then why did she get well?” I asked. “Did she subconsciously want to get well?”
David looked perplexed. If he consigned her illness to her own mind he was stuck with having to consign her remission to mundane and not supernatural causes. God had nothing to do with it.
“What C. S. Lewis would say,” David began, which at once angered Fat, who was present. It maddened him when David turned to C. S. Lewis to bolster his straight-down-the-pipe orthodoxy.