Valis

After one night in the receiving ward of the psychiatric wing of the county medical hospital, Fat underwent his automatic evaluation. A whole host of well-dressed men and women confronted him; each held a clipboard and all of them scrutinized him intently.

Fat put on the trappings of sanity, as best he could. He did everything possible to convince them that he had regained his senses. As he spoke he realized that nobody believed him. He could have delivered his monolog in Swahili with equal effect. All he managed to do was abase himself and thereby divest himself of his last remnant of dignity. He had stripped away his self-respect by his own earnest efforts. Another Chinese finger-trap.

Fuck it, Fat said to himself finally, and ceased talking.

"Go outside," one of the psych techs said, "and well let you know our decision."

"I really have learned my lesson," Fat said as he rose and started out of the room. "Suicide represents the introjection of hostility which should better be directed outward at the person who has frustrated you. I had a lot of time to meditate during the intensive cardiac care unit or ward and I realized that years of self-abnegation and denial manifested itself in my destructive act. But what amazed me the most was the wisdom of my body, which knew not only to defend itself from my mind but specifically how to defend itself. I realize now that Yeats's statement, 'I am an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal' i s diametrically opposite to the actual state of affairs vis-à-vis the human condition."

The psych tech said, "We'll talk to you outside after we've made our decision."

Fat said, "I miss my son."

No one looked at him.

"I thought Beth might hurt Christopher," Fat said. That was the only true statement he had made since entering the room. He had tried to kill himself not so much because Beth had left him but because with her living elsewhere he could not look after his little son.

Presently, he sat outside in the corridor, on a plastic and chrome couch, listening to a fat old woman tell how her husband had plotted to kill her by pumping poison gas under the door of her bedroom. Fat thought back over his life. He did not think about God, who he had seen. He did not say to himself, I am one of the few human beings who has actually seen God. Instead he thought back to Stephanie who had made him the little clay pot which he called Oh Ho because it seemed like a Chinese pot to him. He wondered if Stephanie had become a heroin addict by now or had been locked up in jail, as he was now locked up, or was dead, or married, or living in the snow in Washington like she had always talked about; the state of Washington, which she had never seen but dreamed about. Maybe all of those things or none of them. Maybe she had been crippled in an auto accident. He wondered what Stephanie would say to him if she could see him now, locked up, his wife and child gone, the choke on his car not working, his mind fried.

Were his mind not fried he probably would have thought about how lucky he was to be alive -- not in the philosophical sense of lucky but in the statistical sense. Nobody survives forty - nine tabs of high grade pure digitalis. As a general rule, twice the prescribed dose of digitalis will off you. Fat's prescribed dose had been fixed at q.i.d.:four a day. He had swallowed 12.25 times his prescribed daily dose and survived. The infinite mercies of God make no sense whatsoever, in terms of practical considerations. In addition he had downed all his Librium, twenty Quide and sixty Apresoline, plus half a bottle of wine. All that remained of his medication was a bottle of Miles Nervine. Fat was technically dead.

Spiritually, he was dead, too.

Either he had seen God too soon or he had seen him too late. In any case, it had done him no good at all in terms of survival. Encountering the living God had not helped to equip him for the tasks of ordinary endurance, which ordinary men, not so favored, handle.

But it could also be pointed out -- and Kevin had done so -- that Fat had accomplished something else in addition to seeing God. Kevin had phoned him up one day in excitement, having in his possession another book by Mircea Eliade.

"Listen!" Kevin said. "You know what Eliade says about the dream-time of the Australian bushmen? He says that anthropologists are wrong in assuming that the dream-time is time in the past. Eliade says that it's another kind of time going on right now, which the bushmen break through and into, the age of the heroes and their deeds. Wait; I'll read you the part." An interval of silence. "Fuck," Kevin then said. "I can't find it. But the way they prepare for it is to undergo dreadful pain; it's their ritual of initiation. You were in a lot of pain when you had your experience; you had that impacted wisdom tooth and you were -- " On the phone Kevin lowered his voice; he had been shouting. "You remember. Afraid about the authorities getting you."

"I was nuts," Fat had answered. "They weren't after me."

"But you thought they were and you were so scared you fucking couldn't sleep at night, night after night. And you underwent sensory deprivation."

"Well, I lay in bed unable to sleep."

"You started seeing colors. Floating colors." Kevin had begun to shout again in excitement; when his cynicism vanished he became manic. "That's described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead;that's the trip across to the next world. You were mentally dying! From stress and fear! That's how it's done -- reaching into the next reality! The dream-time!"

Right now Fat sat on the plastic and chrome couch mentally dying; in fact he was already mentally dead, and in the room he had left, the experts were deciding his fate, passing sentence and judgment on what remained of him. It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgment on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

"If they could just get across to the dream-time!" Kevin shouted. "That's the only real time; all the real events happen in the dream-time! The actions of the gods!"

Beside Fat the huge old lady held a plastic pan; for hours she had been trying to throw up the Thorazine they had forced on her; she believed, she rasped at Fat, that the Thorazine had poison in it, by which her husband -- who had penetrated the top levels of the hospital staff under a variety of names -- intended to finish killing her.

"You found your way into the upper realm," Kevin declared. "Isn't that how you put it in your journal?"

#48. Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from hyperuniverse I or Yang, Form I of Parmenides, is sentient and volitional. The lower realm, or Yin, Form II of Parmenides, is mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. In ancient times it was termed "astral determinism." We are trapped, by and large, in the lower realm, but are, through the sacraments, by means of the plasmate, extricated. Until astral determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it, so occluded are we. "The Empire never ended."

A small, pretty, dark-haired girl walked silently past Fat and the huge old woman, carrying her shoes. At breakfast time she had tried to smash a window using her shoes and then, having failed, knocked down a six-foot-high black technician. Now the girl had about her the presence of absolute calm.

"The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself. That one sentence appeared over and over again in his exegesis; it had become his tag line. Originally the sentence had been revealed to him in a great dream. In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old science fiction magazines, in particular Astoundings. In the dream he had looked through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled "The Empire Never Ended." If he could find it and read it he would know everything; that had been the burden of the dream.