Meditating about this I did not comprehend – or maybe I comprehended well enough and didn’t care – that the truck ahead of me had slowed. Its brake lights came on; I didn’t notice. I kept on going in my little VW bug, right on into the tail assembly, the huge iron rear bumper, of the truck. I heard nothing and felt nothing, no concussion or shock. All I saw was my windshield turn into a billion broken Coke bottle bottoms, a strange pattern like a giant spiderweb engulfing me. Fallen into the spiderweb, I remember thinking. To be eaten later. The spiderweb, but where is the spider? I thought. Gone away.
Liquid had spilled over my neck and chest. It was my own blood.
The din around me was terrible. Wheeled down a ramp, strapped flat; I tried to turn my head but could not. Voices, movement; a face peered down at me, a woman’s face, and I heard a woman’s voice. She was flashing a light in my eyes and telling me to do something. I could not do it. Sorry, I thought.
“Are you in a health plan?” another voice asked insistently. “Do you have Blue Cross? Can you sign this form, if I hold it for you? Here’s a pencil. You may sign it with your left hand if you wish.”
The hell with you, I thought.
I could see two California Highway Patrolmen in their brown uniforms, standing off to one side with a clipboard, looking bored. Wheelchairs, gurneys. Little young nurses in short skirts, and a crucifix on the wall.
Beside me a Highway Patrol officer bent down and said, “Don’t let your insurance company fix up your car. It’s leaking oil from the motor. The block is tracked.”
“Okay,” I managed to whisper. I felt nothing, thought nothing.
“I’m going to have to cite you, Mr Brady,” the Highway Patrol officer said. “For following too close and driving at an unsafe speed. I have your license; we’re checking for warrants. You’re going right into surgery, so I’ll return your license to the personal property office of the hospital. It’ll be with your other things, your wallet and keys and money.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The officer departed. I lay there alone, thinking to myself. What the hell, what the hell. They should call somebody, I thought. Rachel. They ought to notify her; I should tell them. Remind them. What do they care? I” thought, I wonder what hospital this is. I was driving -where? Just into Orange County. I never made it back to Placentia, back home. Well, so much for that. I’ll take his advice, I decided. Not let them fix the car. They can total it and auction it. What do I care what I get for it? What do I care about anything?
Two nurses took hold of my gurney and began to wheel it cheerfully. Bump, bump, roll. Stop for the elevator; they stood together, with smiles. I stared fixedly straight up. There was an IV bottle mounted above me. Five percent glucose, I read from the label. To keep a vein open, I decided.
Incredibly bright white lights beamed down on me. This was the operating room. They put a mask over the lower part of my face; I heard male voices, conferring. A needle stuck into my arm. It hurt. It was the first thing I had felt. The bright white lights suddenly turned black, like dead coals.
I floated across a desert landscape which showed red and brown far below me. Far off the outline of mesas. A great void in which I moved, suspended and effortless.
Someone approached me. Far off, beyond the dry mesas. Invisible presence, shining with love. It was Valis.
I recognized his being; he was familiar: the concern, the understanding, the desire to help.
We exchanged no words. I heard no voice, no sound at all except a continual gentle roaring, like wind. The sounds of the wasteland, the desert, the great open places of the world. Wind and water rushing … but they did not seem impersonal; they seemed alive, as if part of Valis. Expressions of him, as kind and warm and loving as he was; he animated the mesas.
Valis asked me, silently, if I thought he had forgotten me.
I said, What if they shoot down the satellite?
No matter. It is a pinpoint in the sky. Behind it lies only light. A sheet of light, not sky.
Did I cash in? I asked.
No response.
I’m coming here eventually, I said. I know that. I recognize this place; I have been here before.
You were born here. You have come back.
This is my homeland, I said.
I am your father, Valis said.
Where are you?
Above the stars, Valis said.
I came from above the stars?
Yes. Many times.
Then, I said, that was me? Who took over when the ad came in the mail?
That was yourself, remembering who you are.
Who am I? I said.
Everyone.
Amazed, I said, Everyone?
No response, only the pulsations of love.
What am I going to do? I asked.
You asked to be broken down, Valis answered. And healed. This is that breaking down and healing. You will be changed.
And go on? I asked.
The warmth of his love consumed me like an invisible^ cloud of light. He responded, And go on. Nothing is ever lost.
I can’t be lost? I asked.
There is nowhere for anything to go. There is only here and us. For all time.
I realized then, that Valis and I had never beerr separated, that he had only fallen silent from time to time. I felt tired, now; I had drifted low over the mesas and I wanted to rest. There was a lessening sense of Valis’s presence, as if he were withdrawing. Yet he still remained, like a lamp turned down, down but not off. Like a child, I has assumed that something no longer seen no longer existed. To an infant, when its parents leave the room they cease to be. But as he grows older he understands differently. They are there whether or not he can see them or touch them or hear their voices. It is an early lesson. But sometimes perhaps not completely learned.
So now I knew who Valis was; he was my father, my real father, from whose race I came repeatedly into this world, to leave again, to return again, to work toward some distant goal unseen, not as yet comprehended. The search, perhaps, was the goal. As I achieved a little motion toward it, I understood it. Overthrowing the tyranny of Ferris Fremont was a stop along the way, not a goal but a moment of decision, from which I then continued as before. Changed to some extent, but changed by my father, not by what I had done. For, I understood, Valis himself did it, through me. The virtue lay with him.
We are gloves, I realized, which our father puts on in order to achieve his objectives. What a pleasure to be that, to be of use. Part of a greater organism: its extensions into space and time, into the world of change. To influence that change – the greatest joy of all.
I can instruct you, Valis’s thoughts came, without the satellite. It is a thing to show them, a shiny toy. To make them understand. When it fired it did its task; it served to open your mind and other minds. Those minds, opened once, will never close. The contact is established and the circuit is in place. It will remain that way. I am linked up then, I realized. For all time. You have remembered. You know. There is now no forgetting. Be of good cheer. Thank you, I said.
The reddish mesas, the level plain below me, faded; the sky closed and the sound of rushing wind slowly diminished.
Valis was out of my sight now, his face turned away from me, retractile in his cycle. I experienced this time no loss, as I always had before.
Son of Earth and starry heaven. The old rite, the disclosure to the ancient initiate. I had undergone the Orphic ceremonies, down in the dark caves, to emerge suddenly into the chamber of light, to see the gold tablet that reminded me of my own nature and my past: trip across space from Albemuth, the far star, migration to this world, to blend here in escape from our molelike enemy. That enemy had soon followed, and the garden we built had been polluted and made toxic with his presence, with his wastes. We sank into the silt; we became half blind; we forgot until reminded. Reminded by the rotating voice from the nearby sky, placed there long ago in case a calamity occurred, a break in the chain of continuity. Such a break did come. And, presently, the voice automatically fired. And informed us, as best as it could, of what we no longer knew.