What Carl Dondero had not thought out clearly is the ominous fact that Los Angeles is the nut capital of the world; that every religious, paranormal, and occult group originates there and draws its followers there; that Nicholas, were he to resettle in the southland, would be exposed to other people like himself and hence would probably worsen rather than mend. Nicholas would be moving to an area which ill defined the quality of sanity. What could we expect from Nicholas, if he were exposed to LA? Valis, most likely, would emerge into the open as Nicholas’s meager contact with reality dwindled out of existence entirely.
Nicholas, however, did not in fact plan to move from Berkeley. He and it were too closely bonded. What he looked forward to was lunch with the brass from Artists and Repertoire at Progressive Records; they would woo him and wine him, and he could then triumphantly say no to them and return to Berkeley, having been given a viable alternative which he had turned down flat. For the rest of his life, as a record clerk on Telegraph Avenue, he could tell himself that he had chosen his life in preference to the disloyalty of moving to LA.
But when he got down to the LA area, in particular down to Orange County and Disneyland, and had had a chance to cruise around in his old Plymouth, he discovered something unexpected, although more or less in fun I had suggested it to him. Parts of that region resembled his Mexico dream. I had been right. Upon leaving the freeway near Anaheim – he took the wrong exit ramp and wound up in the town of Placentia – he discovered Mexican buildings, low-rider Mexican cars, Mexican cafes, and little wooden houses filled with Mexicans. He had stumbled onto a barrio for the first time in his life. The barrio looked like Mexico, except that there were Yellow Cabs. Nicholas had made actual contact with the world of his visionary dream. And this changed everything in regard to taking the job at Progressive Records.
He and Rachel returned to Berkeley, but not to stay. Now that he knew an actual world existed as depicted in his dream – as seen in his dream – Nicholas could not be stopped.
“I was right,” he told me on returning to the Bay Area. “It wasn’t a dream. Valis was showing me where I ought to be living. I have a destiny down there, Phil, that dwarfs anything you can imagine. It leads to the stars.”
“Did Valis tell you what your destiny down there is?” I asked him.
“No.” He shook his head. Til find that out when the time comes. It’s the same principle as in the spy services; you’re to know only what’s necessary for you to know. If you understood the big picture it’d blow your head off. You’d go crazy.”
“Nicholas,” I said, “you’d quit your job and move down to Orange County because of a dream?”
“As soon as I saw the barrio in Placentia I recognized it,” Nicholas said. “Every building and street, every car that passed – they were precisely as I dreamed them. The people walking along, the street signs, even. Down to the smallest detail. Valis intends for me to move down there.”
“Ask him why before you do it. You have a right to know what you’re getting into.”
“I trust Valis.”
“Suppose he’s evil.”
“Evil?” Nicholas stared at me. “He’s the absolute force of good in the universe!”
“I’m not sure I’d trust him,” I said, “if it were me and my life. I mean you are talking about your life, Nick. Here you are giving up your house and your job and your friends because of a dream he shows you – a preview. Maybe it’s just precognition on your part. Maybe you’re a precog.” I had written several stories about precogs, in fact a novel, The World Jones Made, and I tended to view precognition as a mixed blessing. In my stories, and especially in the novel, it placed the character in a closed loop, a victim of his own determinism; he was compelled, just as Nicholas seemed now, to enact later what he foresaw earlier, as if by previewing it he was destined to fall victim to it, rather than obtaining the capacity to escape it. Precognition did not lead to freedom but rather to a macabre fatalism, just as Nicholas now displayed: he had to move to Orange County because, a year ago, he had experienced a preview vision of it. Logically it made no sense. Couldn’t he avoid going just precisely because he had suffered a premonition? I was willing to admit that what Nicholas saw in his dream-vision was an accurate representation of the barrio down in the city of Placentia in Orange County. But I saw it more as a paranormal talent on Nicholas’s part than a communication from an extraterrestrial entity in another solar system. One had to draw the line of common sense somewhere. Using Occam’s Principle of Scientific Parsimony, the simplest theory was mine. One did not need to drag in another, more powerful mind.
However, Nicholas did not view it that way. “It’s not a question of which theory is more economical; it’s a question of what’s true. I’m not in communication with myself. I have no way of knowing that my destiny lies down in Placentia. Only a greater mind, above human level, would know that.”
“Maybe your destiny lies directly at the center of Disneyland. You could sleep under the Matterhorn ride and live on Coke and hot dogs, like they sell there. There’re bathrooms. You’d have all you need.”
Rachel, who was listening to all this, shot me a look of pure malice.
“Well, I’m just doing what you do,” I said to her. “Making fun of him. You don’t want to live in the LA area, do you, Rachel? Outside of Berkeley?”
“I’d never live in Orange County,” Rachel said vehemently.
“There you are,” I said to Nicholas.
Nicholas said, “We’re thinking of splitting up. So she can continue on at the university and I can pursue my destiny down there.”
That made it real. Divorce based on a“ dream. What strange grounds. Cause of divorce? I left my wife because I dreamed about a foreign land . . . which proved to be ten miles from Disneyland, near a lot of orange trees.
Down in plastic-town USA. It was unreal, and yet Nicholas meant it. And they had been married for years.
The resolution to this came three years later when Rachel discovered that she was pregnant. Those were the days of the diaphragm, which wasn’t all that good. This ended her university career; after she had little Johnny she didn’t care where they lived. She got fat and sloppy; her hair became a mess; she forgot all she had learned at school and instead watched daytime TV.
In the mid-sixties they moved to Orange County. In a few years, Ferris F. Fremont would become president of the United States.
How are you to treat a friend whose life is directed from beyond the stars? What attitude do you take? I saw Nicholas rarely after he and Rachel moved down to Orange County, but when I did see him, when they drove up for a prolonged stay in the Bay Area or I flew down to visit them and take in Disneyland, Nicholas always filled me in on what Valis was up to. After he moved to Orange County, Valis communicated with him a lot. So from his standpoint the move was worth it.
Also, the job at Progressive Records turned out to be a vast improvement over working as a record clerk. Retail record selling was a dead end and Nicholas had always known it, whereas the recording field itself was wide open. Rock had become big, now, although that did not affect Progressive Records, which signed only folk artists. Even so, Progressive Records was getting them up there on the sales charts; they had some of the best folk artists under contract, many from the old San Francisco scene: from the Hungry i and the Purple Onion. They almost signed Peter, Paul and Mary, and, according to them, they had turned down the Kingston Trio. I heard about this through Nicholas; being in Artists and Repertoire, he himself auditioned new vocal artists, instrumentalists-, and groups, made tapes of them on location . . . although he did not have the authority to sign them. He did have the authority to reject them, however, and he enjoyed exercising this. It beat changing the toilet paper roll behind listening booth three, back up in Berkeley.
At last Nicholas’s natural ear for a good voice was paying off. His talent plus what he had learned from listening to rare vocal records at University Music late at night were now underwriting him financially. Carl Don-dero hadn’t erred; in doing Nicholas a favor he had done Progressive Records a favor as well.