“The thing that has worried me,” Rachel said, “whenever you talked like this, is, What will he be like to me and Johnny if they’re able to waken him, and I guess tonight shows that he’ll take care of Johnny.”
“With more than I can,” Nicholas said.
“You’re not going to fight?” I said. “You’re just going to let it take you over?”
Nicholas said, “I’m looking forward to it.”
To Rachel, I said, “Are there any vacant apartments in your building?” I was thinking to myself that as a freelance writer I could live anywhere. I didn’t have to remain in the Bay Area.
Smiling a little, Rachel said, “You think you should be down here to help take care of him?”
“Something like that,” I said.
They had both evidently accepted the invasion of Nicholas by this entity; they seemed resigned and not afraid. That was more than I could manage; the whole thing seemed unnatural and terrifying to me, something to be fought with all one had at one’s disposal. The supplanting of a human personality by – whatever it was. Assuming Nicholas’s theories were correct. In point of fact he could be totally wrong. Even so, perhaps because of this, I wanted to be down here. Over the many years Nicholas had been my best friend; he still was, even though six hundred miles separated us. And, like him, I had begun to like the Placentia area. I liked the barrio. There was nothing like it in Berkeley.
“It’s a nice gesture,” Rachel said, “to be with your friend at a time like this.”
“It’s more than a gesture,” I said.
“Before you move to Placentia,” Rachel said, “there is something I found out the other day by accident, that I don’t think either of you realize. I was driving along one of those little palm-lined streets, just driving at random, trying to get Johnny to calm down and go to sleep before we got back to the apartment, and I saw a green clapboard house with a sign on it. „Birthplace of Ferris F. Fremont,“ it said. I asked the manager of our building, and he said, Yes, Ferris Fremont was born in Placentia.”
“Well, he’s not here now,” Nicholas said. “He’s in Washington DC, three thousand miles away.”
“But how grotesque,” Rachel said. To be living in the town where the tyrant was born. Like him, it’s an ugly little house, a dreadful color. I didn’t get out of the car; I didn’t want to go near it, even though it seemed to be open, and people were walking around inside it. Like it was a little museum, probably with exhibits of his schoolbooks and the bed he slept in, like one of those California historical sites you see near the highway.” Nicholas turned to gaze at his wife enigmatically. “And nobody mentioned this to you?” I said. “I don’t think they like to talk about it much,” Rachel said, “the people around here. I think they’d rather keep it secret. Fremont probably paid for it to be made into a historical site himself; I didn’t see any official state marker.”
“I’d like to go there,” I said.
“Fremont,” Nicholas ruminated. “The greatest liar in the history of the world. He probably wasn’t actually born there; he probably had a PR firm pick it out as the kind of place he ought to have been born in. I’d like to see it. Drive by there now, Rachel; let’s take a look at it.” She made a left turn; presently we were moving along very narrow tree-lined streets, some of which weren’t paved. This was Oldtown; I had been driven through it before.
“It’s on Santa Fe,” Rachel said. “I remember noticing that and thinking I’d like to ride Fremont out of town on a rail.”.She pulled up to the curb and parked. “There it is, over there to the right.” She pointed. We could see only dim outlines of houses. Somewhere a TV set played a Spanish program. A dog barked. The air, as usual, was warm. There were no special lights put up around the house where, allegedly, Ferris F. Fremont had been born. Nicholas and I got out of the car and walked over, while Rachel remained in the car, holding the sleeping baby.
“Well, there’s not much to see, and we can’t get inside tonight,” I said to Nicholas.
“I want to determine if it’s a place I foresaw in my vision,” Nicholas said.
“You’re going to have to do that tomorrow.”
Together he and I walked slowly along the sidewalk; grass grew in the cracks, and once Nicholas stubbed his toe and swore. We arrived at last at the corner, where we halted.
Bending down, Nicholas examined a word incised in the cement of the sidewalk, a very old word put there some time ago, when the sidewalk had been wet. It was professionally printed.
“Look!” Nicholas said.
I bent down and read the word.
ARAMCHEK
“That was the original name of this street,” Nicholas said, “evidently. Before they changed it. So that’s where Fremont got the name of that conspiratorial group: from his childhood. From finding it written on the sidewalk. He probably doesn’t even remember now. He must have played here.”
The idea of Ferris Fremont playing here as a little boy the idea of Ferris Fremont as a little boy at all, anywhere was too bizarre to be believed. He had rolled his tricycle by these very houses, skipped over the very cracks we had tripped on in the night; his mother had probably warned him about cars passing along this street. The little boy playing here and inventing fantasies in his head about people passing, about the mysterious word ARAMCHEK inscribed in the cement under his feet, conjecturing over the weeks and months as to what it meant, discerning in a child’s mind secret and occult purposes in it that were to blossom later on in adulthood. Into full-blown, florid, paranoid delusions about a vast conspiratorial organization with no fixed beliefs and no actual membership but somehow a titanic enemy of society, to be hunted out and destroyed wherever found. I wondered how much of this had come into his head while he was still a child. Maybe he had imagined the entire thing then. As an adult he had merely voiced it.
“Could be the contractor’s name,” I said, “rather than the original street name. They inscribe that too, sometimes, when they’re done with a job.”
“Maybe it means an inspector had gone by here and completed his job of checking all the arams,” Nicholas said. “What’s an aram? Or it could mean the spot where you check for arams. You stick a metal pole down through a little hole in the pavement and take a reading, like a water-meter reading.” He laughed.
“It is mysterious,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a street name. Probably, if it was, it was named after somebody.”
“An early Slavic settler to Orange County. Originally from the Urals. Raised cattle and wheat. Maybe owned a big land-grant ranch, deeded to him from the Mexicans. I wonder what his brand would be. An aram and then a check mark.”
“We’re doing what Ferris did,” I said.
“But along more reasonable lines. We’re not nuts. How much can you get from a single word?”
“Maybe Ferris Fremont knows more than we do. Maybe he put investigators into it, after he grew up and had money; maybe that was a childhood dream fulfilled: to research the mysterious word ARAMCHEK and find out what it really meant and why they had thought to stick it into the sidewalk forever and ever.”
“Too bad Ferris didn’t ask someone what the word meant.”
I said, “He probably did. And he’s still asking. That’s the problem; he still wants to know. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers he got – like, „It’s the old street name. It’s a contractor.“ That wasn’t enough. It portended more.”
“It doesn’t portend anything to me,” Nicholas said. “It’s just a weird word stuck in the cement sidewalk that’s been here God knows how many years. Let’s go.” He and I returned to the car and presently Rachel was driving us all back to the apartment.
Several years after Ferris F. Fremont had been elected President of the United States, I moved from the Bay Area to Southern California to be with my friend Nicholas Brady. I had been doing well in my writing career; in 1963 I had won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of the year for my novel The Man in the High Castle. That book had to do with an imaginary alternate Earth in which Germany and Japan had won World War II and had divided the United States between them, with a buffer zone in the middle. I had written several other well received novels and was beginning to get solid critical comment, especially on my really insane novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had to do with long hallucinogenic trips by the characters under the influence of psychedelic drugs. It was my first work dealing with drugs, and it soon earned me the reputation of being involved with drugs myself. This notoriety paid off well in sales but came back later on to haunt me.