“Even when the disinhibiting stimulus is encountered?”
“No, it would all seem natural, what I’d say and do. I’d think it was my idea. Like a posthypnotic suggestion; you incorporate it into your world view as logical. No matter how bizarre, or how destructive, or how – “ Again he was silent, and this time he did not resume speaking.
“You’ve changed,” I said. “Besides being more mature, but along those lines.”
“Moving down here has changed me,” Nicholas said, “and the research I’ve done has changed me; now I have the financial resources to get prime source material to go on. Herb Jackman never paid me beans, Phil. I just floundered around.”
“It’s more than doing research,” I said. “Berkeley is full of people doing research. What sort of friends do you have down here? Who’ve you met?”
“People at Progressive, mostly,” Nicholas said. “Professional people, in the music industry.”
“Have you told them about Valis?”
“No.”
“Have you talked to a psychiatrist?”
“Shit,” Nicholas said wearily. “You know and I know this isn’t a matter for a psychiatrist. I might have thought that a long, long time ago. Years ago and six hundred miles away, in a town that was nuts. Orange County isn’t nuts; it’s very conservative and very stable. The nuts are up north in LA County, not here. I missed the nut belt by sixty-five miles; I overshot. Hell, I didn’t overshoot; I was deliberately shot down here, to central Orange County. To get out of parochial towns like Berkeley. To a place where I could think and introspect, get perspective and some kind of understanding. More confidence, really. That is what I think I’ve acquired, if anything.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
Nicholas said, half to himself, “It all seemed sort of -like fun, back in Berkeley, these inner contacts with another mind, deep in the night, involuntarily, with me just lying there passive and having to hear whether I liked it or not. We were kids there in Berkeley; no one living in Berkeley ever really grows up. Perhaps that’s why Ferris Fremont loathes Berkeley so.”
“You’re aware of him a lot,” I said, “now that you’re down here?”
“I’m aware of Ferris Fremont,” Nicholas said cryptically. “Now that I’m down here, yes.”
Because of an imaginary voice,.Nicholas had become a whole person, rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness. What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, Suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history . . . We would be hard put to defend the use of the term “imaginary” then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an “imaginary” voice telling him to sail west, or a “real” voice telling him the idea was hopeless?
Without Valis addressing him in his sleep, showing him visually a happier promise, speaking to him persuasively, Nicholas would have visited Disneyland and returned to Berkeley. I knew it and Nicholas knew it. Whether anyone else assessed it this way was unimportant; I knew him and I knew that on his own, unaided, he would have stayed in his rut forever. Something had intervened in Nicholas’s life and destroyed the hold that bad karma had on him. Something had severed the iron chains.
This, I realized, is how a man becomes what he is not: by doing what he could never do – in Nicholas’s case, the totally impossible act of moving from Berkeley to Southern California. All his compeers would still be up there; / was still up there. It was spectacular; here he was, raised in Berkeley, sitting in his modern apartment (Berkeley has no modern apartments) in Placentia, wearing a florid Southern California-style shirt and slacks and shoes; already he had become part of the lifestyle here. The days of bluejeans were gone.
The imaginary presence of Valis – whose name Nicholas had been forced to make up, for want of a real one – had made him into what he was not; had he gone to a psychiatrist he would still be what he was, and he would stay what he was. The psychiatrist would have focused his attention on the origin of the voice, not on its intentions or on the results. That very psychiatrist was probably still living in Berkeley. No nocturnal voices, no invisible presence sketching out a happier life, would have plagued him. How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.
“Okay, Nick,” I said. “You win.”
“Pardon?” He glanced at me, a little wearily. “Oh, I see. Yes, I guess I win. Phil, how could I have stayed in Berkeley so long? Why did it take someone else, another voice, not mine, to goad me into life? Why was that necessary?”
“Um,” I said.
“The incredible part is not that I heard Valis, listened to Valis, and moved here, but that without him, or them, I wouldn’t have contemplated it, let alone done it. Phil, the idea of leaving Berkeley, quitting my job with Herb Jackman – it wouldn’t even have entered my mind.”
“Yeah, that is the incredible part,” I agreed. He was right. It said something about the normal trajectory of human existence, Homo unimpeded: allowed to trudge out his circular course, like a wedge of dead rock circling a dead sun, mindless and purposeless, deaf to the universe at large, as blind as it was cold. Something into which no new idea ever came. Barred forever from originality. It made you stop and reflect.
Nicholas said, “Whoever they are, Phil, I have no choice but to trust them. I’m going to be doing what they want anyhow.”
“I think you’ll know,” I said, “when your programming fires.” If indeed – sobering thought – he had been programmed.
“You suppose I’ll notice? I’ll be too busy to notice.”
That chilled me: the thought of him in action all at once, blurring, as if possessing sixteen arms.
They-”Nicholas continued.
“I wish you wouldn’t call them „they,““ I said. “It makes me nervous. I’d be a lot less nervous if you’d say „he.““
“It’s the joke about the five-thousand-pound canary: where does it sleep?” Nicholas said.
“Anywhere it wants.”
“I call them „they,““ Nicholas said, “because I’ve seen more than one of them. A woman, a man. Two for openers, and two is they.”
“What’d they look like?”
After a pause, Nicholas said, “Of course you realize these were dreams. And dreams are distorted. The conscious mind sets up a barrier.”
To protect itself,” I finished.
Nicholas said, They had three eyes. The normal two, and then one with a lens, not a pupil. Dead center in the forehead. That third eye witnessed everything. They could turn it on and off, and when it was off it was entirely gone. Invisible. And during that time” – he took a deep shuddering breath – “they looked just like us. We – never guessed.” He became silent.
“Oh, good God,” I said aloud.
“Yep,” Nicholas said, stoically.
“Did they speak?”
“They were mute. And deaf. -They were in round chambers like bathyspheres, with lots of wires running to them, like electronic booster equipment, communications equipment, phone-type wires. The wires and boosters were so they could communicate with us, so their thoughts would form words we could hear and understand, and so they could hear us back. It was difficult, a strain for them.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
“Hell, you write about it all the time. I’ve been reading some of your novels, finally. You – “
“Writing fiction,” I said. “It’s all fiction.”
Their craniums were enlarged,” Nicholas said.
“What?” I was having trouble following him; it was too much for me.
“To accommodate the third eye. Massive craniums. A wholly different skull shape from ours, very long. The Egyptian Pharaoh had it – Ikhnaton. And Ikhnaton’s two daughters, but not his wife. It was hereditary on his side.”
I open the bedroom door and walked back into the living room where Rachel sat reading.
“He’s crazy,” Rachel said remotely, not looking up from her book.
“Right,” I said. “Completely. Nothing left. Only thing is, I don’t want to be here when his programming fires.”
She said nothing; she turned a page.
Following me out of the bedroom, Nicholas approached the two of us; he held a piece of paper toward me, for me to see. “This is a sign they showed me several times, two intersecting arcs arranged – well, you can see. It’s a little like the Christian fish sign, the side of the fish with the arcs forming its body. The interesting thing is, if an arc intersects once -”
From the design on the extended piece of paper a pinkish-purple beam of light, an inch in diameter, fired upward into Nicholas’s face. He shut his eyes, grimaced with pain, dropped the sheet of paper, and swiftly put his hand to his forehead. “All of a sudden,” he said thickly, “I have the most violent headache.”