Dick, Philip K - Valis

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VALIS

Philip K. Dick

VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intel-

ligence System, from an American film): A

perturbation in the reality field in which a

spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex

is formed, tending progressively to subsume

and incorporate its environment into arrange-

ments of information. Characterized by quasi-

consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth

and an armillary coherence.

-Great Soviet Dictionary

Sixth Edition, 1992

Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any

Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling

everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.

At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fat's

delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do

two things: get off dope (which he hadn't done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).

As a matter of fact, he had no Nembutals. He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did sleeping pills. He

did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. Anyhow, he

wouldn't have done it if he could.

"I have ten," he said. Because if he told her the truth she would hang up.

"Then I'll drive up to your place," Gloria said in a rational, calm voice, the same tone in which she had asked

for the pills.

He realized then that she was not asking for help. She was trying to die. She was completely crazy. If she

were sane she would realize that it was necessary to veil her purpose, because this way she made him guilty of

complicity. For him to

agree, he would need to want her dead. No motive existed for him-or anyone-to want that. Gloria was gentle

and civilized, but she dropped a lot of acid. It was obvious that the acid, since he had last heard from her six

months ago, had wrecked her mind.

"What've you been doing?" Fat asked.

"I've been in Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. I tried suicide and my mother committed me. They

discharged me last week."

"Are you cured?" he said.

"Yes," she said.

That's when Fat began to go nuts. At the time he didn't know it, but he had been drawn into an unspeakable

psychological game. There was no way out. Gloria Knudson had wrecked him, her friend, along with her own

brain. Probably she had wrecked six or seven other people, all friends who loved her, along the way, with

similar phone conversations. She had undoubtedly destroyed her mother and father as well. Fat heard in her

rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void. He was not dealing with a person; he had a reflex-arc

thing at the other end of the phone line.

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to

Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger-trap, where the harder you pull

to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

"Where are you now?" he asked.

"Modesto. At my parents' home."

Since he lived in Marin County, she was several hours' drive away. Few inducements would have gotten him

to make such a drive. This was another serving-up of lunacy: three hours' drive each way for ten Nembutals.

Why not just total the car? Glora [sic] was not even committing her irrational act rationally. Thank you, Tim

Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.

He did not know his own life was on the line. This was 1971. In 1972 he would be up north in Vancouver,

British Columbia, involved in trying to kill himself, alone, poor and scared, in a foreign city. Right now he was

spared that knowledge. All he wanted to do was coax Gloria up to Marin County so he could help her. One of

God's greatest mercies

is that he keeps us perpetually occluded. In 1978, totally crazy with grief, Horselover Fat would slit his wrist

(the Vancouver suicide attempt having failed), take forty-nine tablets of high-grade digitalis, and sit in a closed

garage with his car motor running-and fail there, too. Well, the body has powers unknown to the mind.

However, Gloria's mind had total control over her body; she was rationally insane.

Most insanity can be identified with the bizarre and the theatrical. You put a pan on your head and a towel

around your waist, paint yourself purple and go outdoors. Gloria was as calm as she had ever been; polite and

civilized. If she had lived in ancient Rome or Japan, she would have gone unnoticed. Her driving skills

probably remained unimpaired. She would stop at every red light and not exceed the speed limit-on her trip to

pick up the ten Nembutals.

I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity. I did not love

Gloria Knudson, but I liked her. In Berkeley, she and her husband had given elegant parties, and my wife and I

always got invited. Gloria spent hours fixing little sandwiches and served different wines, and she dressed up

and looked lovely, with her sandy-colored short-cut curly hair.

Anyhow, Horselover Fat had no Nembutal to give her, and a week later Gloria threw herself out of a tenth

floor window of the Synanon Building in Oakland, California, and smashed herself to bits on the pavement

along MacArthur Boulevard, and Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness,

the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe. Fat was ahead of his time,

ahead of the universe. Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully

occludes us to the past as well as the future. For two months, after he learned of Gloria's suicide, he cried and

watched TV and took more dope-his brain was going, too, but he didn't know it. Infinite are the mercies of

God.

As a matter of fact, Fat had lost his own wife, the year before, to mental illness. It was like a plague. No one

could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America-1960 to 1970-and this place, the Bay Area of

Northern California, was totally fucked. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's the truth. Fancy terms and ornate

theories cannot cover this fact up. The authorities became as psy-

chotic as those they hunted. They wanted to put all persons who were not clones of the establishment away.

The authorities were filled with hate. Fat had seen police glower at him with the ferocity of dogs. The day they

moved Angela Davis, the black Marxist, out of the Marin County jail, the authorities dismantled the whole

civic center. This was to baffle radicals who might intend trouble. The elevators got unwired; doors got

relabeled with spurious information; the district attorney hid. Fat saw all this. He had gone to the civic center

that day to return a library book. At the electronic hoop at the civic center entrance, two cops had ripped open

the book and papers that Fat carried. He was perplexed. The whole day perplexed him. In the cafeteria, an

armed cop watched everyone eat. Fat returned home by cab, afraid of his own car and wondering if he was

nuts. He was, but so was everyone else.

I am, by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria

Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California. There's a photo of her funeral wreaths in my photo album. It's a

color photo so you can see how lovely the wreaths are. In the background a VW is parked. I can be seen

crawling into the VW, in the midst of the service. I am not able to take any more.

After the graveside service Gloria's former husband Bob and I and some tearful friend of his-and hers-had a

late lunch at a fancy restaurant in Modesto near the cemetery. The waitress seated us in the rear because the

three of us looked like hippies even though we had suits and ties on. We didn't give a shit. I don't remember

what we talked about. The night before, Bob and I-I mean, Bob and Horselover Fat-drove to Oakland to see the

movie Patton. Just before the graveside service Fat met Gloria's parents for the first time. Like their deceased

daughter, they treated him with utmost civility. A number of Gloria's friends stood around the corny California

ranch-style living room recalling the person who linked them together. Naturally, Mrs. Knudson wore too much

makeup; women always put on too much makeup when someone dies. Fat petted the dead girl's cat, Chairman

Mao. He remembered the few days Gloria had spent with him upon her futile trip to his house for the Nembutal

which he did not have. She greeted the disclosure of his lie with

aplomb, even a neutrality. When you are going to die you do not care about small things.

"I took them," Fat had told her, lie upon lie.

They decided to drive to the beach, the great ocean beach of the Point Reyes Peninsula. In Gloria's VW, with

Gloria driving (it never entered his mind that she might, on impulse, wipe out him, herself and the car) and, an

hour later, sat together on the sand smoking dope.

What Fat wanted to know most of all was why she intended to kill herself.

Gloria had on many-times-washed jeans and a T-shirt with Mick Jagger's leering face across the front of it.

Because the sand felt nice she took off her shoes. Fat noticed that she had pink-painted toenails and that they

were perfectly pedicured. To himself he thought, she died as she lived.

"They stole my bank account," Gloria said.

After a time he realized, from her measured, lucidly stated narration, that no "they" existed. Gloria unfolded a

panorama of total and relentless madness, lapidary in construction. She had filled in all the details with tools as

precise as dental tools. No vacuum existed anywhere in her account. He could find no error, except of course

for the premise, which was that everyone hated her, was out to get her, and she was worthless in every respect.

As she talked she began to disappear. He watched her go; it was amazing. Gloria, in her measured way, talked

herself out of existence word by word. It was rationality at the service of-well, he thought, at the service of

nonbeing. Her mind had become one great, expert eraser. All that really remained now was her husk; which is

to say, her uninhabited corpse.

She is dead now, he realized that day on the beach.

After they had smoked up all their dope, they walked along and commented on seaweed and the height of

waves. Seagulls croaked by overhead, sailing themselves like frisbies. A few people sat or walked here and

there, but mostly the beach was deserted. Signs warned of undertow. Fat, for the life of him, could not figure

out why Gloria didn't simply walk out into the surf. He simply could not get into her head. All she could think

of was the Nembutal she still needed, or imagined she needed.

"My favorite Dead album is Workingman's Dead," Gloria

said at one point. "But I don't think they should advocate taking cocaine. A lot of kids listen to rock."

"They don't advocate it. The song's just about someone taking it. And it killed him, indirectly; he smashed up

his train."

"But that's why I started on drugs," Gloria said.

"Because of the Grateful Dead?"

"Because," Gloria said, "everyone wanted me to do it. I'm tired of doing what other people want me to do."

"Don't kill yourself," Fat said. "Move in with me. I'm all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least.

Well move your stuff up, me and my friends. There's lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach

today. Isn't it nice here?"

To that, Gloria said nothing.

"It would really make me feel terrible," Fat said. "For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself."

Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a

favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW

over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits; Fat learned this later in Vancouver, when,

suicidal himself, he phoned the British Columbia Crisis Center and got expert advice. There was no corrolation

[sic] between this and what he told Gloria on the beach that day.

Pausing to rub a small stone loose from her foot, Gloria said, "I'd like to stay overnight at your place tonight."

Hearing this, Fat experienced involuntary visions of sex.

"Far out," he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of

phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. He did so now,

deluded by his own carnality into imagining that he had saved his friend's life. His judgment, which wasn't

worth much anyhow, dropped to a new nadir of acuity. The existence of a good person hung in the balance,

hung in a balance which Fat held, and all he could think of now was the prospect of scoring. "I can dig it," he

prattled away as they walked. "Out of sight."

A few days later she was dead. They spent that night together, sleeping fully dressed; they did not make love;

the next afternoon Gloria drove off, ostensibly to get her stuff

from her parents' house in Modesto. He never saw her again. For several days he waited for her to show up and

then one night the phone rang and it was her ex-husband Bob.

"Where are you right now?" Bob asked.

The question bewildered him; he was at home, where his phone was, in the kitchen. Bob sounded calm. 'I'm

here," Fat said.

"Gloria killed herself today," Bob said.

I have a photo of Gloria holding Chairman Mao in her arms; Gloria is kneeling and smiling and her eyes

shine. Chairman Mao is trying to get down. To their left, part of a Christmas tree can be seen. On the back,

Mrs. Knudson has written in tidy letters:

How we made her feel gratitude for our love.

I've never been able to fathom whether Mrs. Knudson wrote that after Gloria's death or before. The Knudsons

mailed me the photo a month-mailed Horselover Fat the photo a month-after Gloria's funeral. Fat had written

asking for a photo of her. Initially he had asked Bob, who replied in a savage tone, "What do you want a picture

of Gloria for?" To which Fat could give no answer. When Fat got me started writing this, he asked me why I

thought Bob Langley got so mad at his request. I don't know. I don't care. Maybe Bob knew that Gloria and Fat

had spent a night together and he was jealous. Fat used to say Bob Langley was a schizoid; he claimed that Bob

himself told him that. A schizoid lacks proper affect to go with his thinking; he's got what's called "flattening of

affect." A schizoid would see no reason not to tell you that about himself. On the other hand, Bob bent down

after the graveside service and put a rose on Gloria's coffin. That was about when Fat had gone crawling off to

the VW. Which reaction is more appropriate? Fat weeping in the parked car by himself, or the ex-husband

bending down with the rose, saying nothing, showing nothing, but doing something . . . Fat contributed nothing

to the funeral except a bundle of flowers which he had belatedly bought on the trip down to Modesto. He had

given them to Mrs. Knudson, who remarked that they were lovely. Bob had picked them out.

After the funeral, at the fancy restaurant where the waitress had moved the three of them out of view, Fat

asked Bob what Gloria had been doing at Synanon, since she was supposed to be getting her possessions

together and driving back up to Marin County to live with him-he had thought.

"Carmina talked her into going to Synanon," Bob said. That was Mrs. Knudson. "Because of her history of

drug involvement."

Timothy, the friend Fat didn't know, said, "They sure didn't help her very much."

What had happened was that Gloria walked in the front door of Synanon and they had gamed her right off.

Someone, on purpose, had walked past her as she sat waiting to be interviewed and had remarked on how ugly

she was. The next person to parade past had informed her that her hair looked like something a rat slept in.

Gloria had always been sensitive about her curly hair. She wished it was long like all the other hair in the

world. What the third Synanon member would have said was moot, because by then Gloria had gone upstairs to

the tenth floor.

"Is that how Synanon works?" Fat asked.

Bob said, "It's a technique to break down the personality. It's a fascist therapy that makes the person totally

outer-directed and dependent on the group. Then they can build up a new personality that isn't drug oriented."

"Didn't they realize she was suicidal?" Timothy asked.

"Of course," Bob said. "She phoned in and talked to them; they knew her name and why she was there."

"Did you talk to them after her death?" Fat asked.

Bob said, "I phoned them up and asked to talk to someone high up and I told him they had killed my wife,

and the man said that they wanted me to come down there and teach them how to handle suicidal people. He

was super upset. I felt sorry for him."

At that, hearing that, Fat decided that Bob himself was not right in the head. Bob felt sorry for Synanon. Bob

was all fucked up. Everyone was fucked up, including Carmina Knudson. There wasn't a sane person left in

Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else. He sat eating his salad and wondering where he

could go. Out of the country. Flee to Canada, like the draft protesters. He personally knew ten guys who had

slipped across into Canada rather than

fight in Vietnam. Probably in Vancouver he would run into half a dozen people he knew. Vancouver was

supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Like San Francisco, it was a major port. He could

start life all over and forget the past.

It entered his head as he sat fooling with his salad that when Bob phoned he hadn't said, "Gloria killed

herself" but rather "Gloria killed herself today," as if it had been inevitable that she would do it one day or

another. Perhaps this had done it, this assumption. Gloria had been timed, as if she were taking a math test.

Who really was the insane one? Gloria or himself (probably himself) or her ex-husband or all of them, the Bay

Area, not insane in the loose sense of the term but in the strict technical sense? Let it be said that one of the first

symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger-

trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped

by degrees into madness.

I wish I could have helped him.

Although there was nothing I could do to help Horselover Fat, he did escape death. The first thing that came

along to save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old highschool girl living down the street from him and the

second was God. Of the two of them the girl did better.

I'm not sure God did anything at all for him; in fact in some ways God made him sicker. This was a subject

on which Fat and I could not agree. Fat was certain that God had healed him completely. That is not possible.

There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." That fits my friend.

Stephanie entered Fat's life as a dope dealer. After Gloria's death he did so much dope that he had to buy from

every source available to him. Buying dope from highschool kids is not a smart move. It has nothing to do with

dope itself but with the law and with morality. Once you begin to buy dope from kids you are a marked man.

I'm sure it's obvious why. But the thing I knew-which the authorities did not-is this: Horselover Fat really

wasn't interested in the dope that Stephanie had for sale. She dealt hash and grass but never uppers. She did not

approve of uppers. Stephanie never sold anything she did not approve of. She never sold psychedelics no

matter what pressure was put on her. Now and then she sold cocaine. Nobody could quite figure out her

reasoning, but it was a form of reasoning. In the normal sense, Stephanie did not think at all. But she did arrive

at decisions,

and once she arrived at them no one could budge her. Fat liked her.

There lay the gist of it; he liked her and not the dope, but to maintain a relationship with her he had to be a

buyer, which meant he had to do hash. For Stephanie, hash was the beginning and end of life-life worth living,

anyhow.

If God came in a poor second, at least he wasn't doing anything illegal, as Stephanie was. Fat was convinced

that Stephanie would wind up in jail; he expected her to be arrested any day. All Fat's friends expected him to

be arrested any day. We worried about that and about his slow decline into depression and psychosis and

isolation. Fat worried about Stephanie. Stephanie worried about the price of hash. More so, she worried about

the price of cocaine. We used to imagine her suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and

exclaiming, "Coke has gone up to a hundred dollars a gram!" She worried about the price of dope the way

normal women worry about the price of coffee.

We used to argue that Stephanie could not have existed before the Sixties. Dope had brought her into being,

summoned her out of the very ground. She was a coefficient of dope, part of an equation. And yet it was

through her that Fat made his way eventually to God. Not through her dope; it had nothing to do with dope.

There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous. The means by which Stephanie

brought Horselover Fat to God was by means of a little clay pot which she threw on her kickwheel, a kickwheel

which Fat had helped pay for, as a present on her eighteenth birthday. When he fled to Canada he took the pot

with him, wrapped up in shorts, socks and shirts, in his single suitcase.

It looked like an ordinary pot: squat and light brown, with a small amount of blue glaze as trim. Stephanie

was not an expert potter. This pot was one of the first she threw, at least outside of her ceramics class in high

school. Naturally, one of her first pots would go to Fat. She and he had a close relationship. When he'd get

upset, Stephanie would quiet him down by supercharging him with her hashpipe. The pot was unusual in one

way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a

theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn't say. In

Horselover

Fat's case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely

enough and virtually too late. You can't hold Stephanie responsible for that; she threw the pot, glazed it and

fired it as soon as she had the kickwheel. She did her best to help her friend Fat, who, like Gloria before him,

was beginning to die. She helped her friend the way Fat had tried to help his friend, only Stephanie did a better

job. But that was the difference between her and Fat In a crisis she knew what to do. Fat did not. Therefore Fat

is alive today and Gloria is not Fat had a better friend than Gloria had had. Perhaps he would have wanted it the

other way around but the option was not his. We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The

universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of those decisions some people live and some people die.

This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity. Fat got God, and Gloria Knudson got death.

It is unfair and Fat would be the first person to say so. Give him credit for that

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 undi-

agnosed 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 G.P., 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 pat-

terns 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 his 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 "Desarts [sic] 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, per-

haps 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 focussed 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 to-

day" 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 out

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 the 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 pyschology 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.

"Maybe Sherri overrode God," I said. "God wanted her sick and she fought to get well." The thrust of David's

impending argument would of course be that Sherri had neurotically gotten cancer due to being fucked up, but

God had stepped in and saved her; I had turned it around in anticipation.

"No," Fat said. "It's the other way around. Like when he cured me."

Fortunately, Kevin was not present. He did not consider Fat cured (nor did anyone else) and anyway God

didn't do it. That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. Freud

considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. Someone is accused of stealing a horse, to which he

replies, "I don't steal horses and anyhow you have a crummy horse." If you ponder the reasoning in this you can

see the actual thought-process behind it. The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it

does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations-brought on by Fat's supposed encounter with the

divine-the two-proposition self-cancelling structure would appear like this:

1) God does not exist

2) And anyhow he's stupid.

* * *

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摘要：

VALISPhilipK.DickVALIS(acronymofVastActiveLivingIntel-ligenceSystem,fromanAmericanfilm):Aperturbationintherealityfieldinwhichaspontaneousself-monitoringnegentropicvortexisformed,tendingprogressivelytosubsumeandincorporateitsenvironmentintoarrange-mentsofinformation.Characterizedbyquasi-consciousness...

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