VALIS

by Philip K. Dick

What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. To listen to Gloria rationally ask to die was to inhale the contagion. It was a Chinese finger-trap, where the harder you pull to get out, the tighter the trap gets.

Since he lived in Marin County, she was several hours’ drive away. Few inducements would have gotten him to make such a drive. This was another serving-up of lunacy: three hours’ drive each way for ten Nembutals. Why not just total the car? Gloria was not even committing her irrational act rationally. Thank you, Tim Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.

One of God’s greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded. In 1976, totally crazy with grief, Horselover Fat would slit his wrist (the Vancouver suicide attempt having failed), take forty-nine tablets of high-grade digitalis, and sit in a closed garage with his car motor running-and fail there, too. Well, the body has powers unknown to the mind. However, Gloria’s mind had total control over her body; she was rationally insane.

But that was the difference between her and Fat. In a crisis she knew what to do. Fat did not. Therefore Fat is alive today and Gloria is not. Fat had a better friend than Gloria had had. Perhaps he would have wanted it the other way around but the option was not his. We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of those decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity. Fat got God, and Gloria Knudson got death. It is unfair and Fat would be the first person to say so. Give him credit for that.

He said nothing. But I had the impression that he was not being up front with me. I had the feeling that I had seen his color. Why he would not say so, if such it was, I do not know. Maybe the notion spoiled a more elegant theory. The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

Fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information. He started keeping a journal – had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person. His encounter with God was all there on the pages in his – Fat’s, not God’s-handwriting.

That gives you an idea of where our theological arguments tended to wind up. Three malinformed people disagreeing with one another.

Fat had the good sense not to discuss Gloria Knudson and her death in front of Kevin. Had he done so, Kevin would add her to his dead cat. He would be talking about whipping her out from under his coat on judgment day, along with the cat.

In my opinion, Kevin’s cynical stance had done more to ratify Fat’s madness than any other single factor – any other, that is, than the original cause, whatever that might have been. Kevin had become the unintentional instrument of that original cause, a realization which had not escaped Fat. In no way, shape or form did Kevin represent a viable alternative to mental illness. His cynical grin had about it the grin of death; he grinned like a triumphant skull. Kevin lived to defeat life. It originally amazed me that Fat would put up with Kevin, but later I could see why. Every time Kevin tore down Fat’s system of delusions – mocked them and lampooned them – Fat gained strength. If mockery were the only antidote to his malady, he was palpably better off as he stood. Whacked out as he was, Fat could see this. Actually, were the truth known, Kevin could see it too. But he evidently had a feedback loop in his head that caused him to step up the attacks rather than abandon them. His failure reinforced his efforts. So the attacks grew and Fat’s strength grew. It resembled a Greek myth.

Fat put on the trappings of sanity, as best he could.

Fat knew that if he said anything, anything at all, they would hold him the ninety days. So he said nothing. When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

‘Why don’t you play cards?’ Penny, a psych tech, asked him. ‘Poker and blackjack are not card games but money games,’ Fat said, lowering his book. ‘Since we’re not allowed to have any money on us, there’s no point in playing.’

It is characteristic of the mentally ill to hate those who help them and love those who connive against them. Fat still loved Beth and he detested OCMC. This showed he belonged in the North Ward; I have no doubt of it. Beth knew when she took Christopher and left for parts unknown that Fat would try suicide; he’d tried it in Canada. In fact, Beth planned to move back in as soon as Fat offed himself. She told him so later. Also, she told him that it had infuriated her that he’d failed to kill himself. When he asked her why that had infuriated her, Beth said: ‘You have once again shown your inability to do anything.’

One time Fat found a posted notice that fascinated him. The notice stipulated what could not be done, in order of descending importance. Near the top of the list all parties concerned were told: NO ONE IS TO REMOVE ASHTRAYS FROM THE WARD. And later down the list it stated: FRONTAL LOBOTOMIES ARE NOT TO BE PERFORMED WITHOUT THE WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE PATIENT.

‘I’m very interested in what you’re saying,’ Dr Stone said. Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out, and now knew that Fat was totally insane. Which meant that Fat could look forward to a court appearance and ninety days. This is a mournful discovery. 1) Those who agree with you are insane. 2) Those who do not agree with you are in power.

About this time two new propositions entered Fat’s mind, due to this particular conversation. 1) Some of those in power are insane. 2) And they are right.

Dr Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat’s life. To get to Stone, Fat had had to nearly kill himself physically, matching his mental death. Is this what they mean about God’s mysterious ways? How else could Fat have linked up with Leon Stone? Only some dismal act on the order of a suicide attempt, a truly lethal attempt, would have achieved it; Fat had to die, or nearly die, to be cured. Or nearly cured.

I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence – a series of words – which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second. Stephanie had come close when she made the little ceramic pot Oh Ho and presented it to Fat as her gift of love, a love she lacked the verbal skills to articulate.

What if a high form of sentient mimicry existed – such a high form that no human (or few humans) had detected it? What if it could only be detected if it wanted to be detected? Which is to say, not truly detected at all, since under these circumstances it had advanced out of its camouflaged state to disclose itself. ‘Disclose’ might in this case equal ‘theophany.’ The astonished human being would say, I saw God; whereas in fact he saw only a highly evolved ultra-terrestrial life form, a UTI, or an extra-terrestrial life form (an ETI) which had come here at some time in the past ... and perhaps, as Fat conjectured, had slumbered for nearly two thousand years in dormant seed form as living information in the codices at Nag Hammadi, which explained why reports of its existence had broken off abruptly around 70 A.D.

Once when I lectured at the University of California at Fullerton, a student asked me for a short, simple definition of reality. I thought it over and answered, ‘Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.’

In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain – any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic (which means being unable or unwilling to enjoy pleasure). Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has control. Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. P...

Fat soon developed the opinion that religion was a sideline at Sherri’s church. Answering the phone and mailing out stuff took the center ring. A number of nebulous people – who might as well be named Larry, Moe and Curly, as far as Fat was concerned – haunted the church, holding down salaries inevitably larger than Sherri’s and requiring less work. Sherri wished death to all of them. She often spoke with relish about their misfortunes, as for instance when their cars wouldn’t start or they got speeding tickets or Father Larry expressed dissatisfaction toward them.

‘I’m going to call you the next time he comes in,’ she told Fat. ‘I’m not going to be there alone with him. There isn’t enough money in the Bishop’s Discretionary Fund to pay me for putting up with Jack Barbina, especially on what they do pay me, which is about half what Eddy makes, the little fairy.’ To Sherri, the world was divided up among slackers, maniacs, junkies, homosexuals and back-stabbing friends. She also had little use for Mexicans and blacks. Fat used to wonder at her total lack of Christian charity, in the emotional sense. How could – why would – Sherri want to work in a church and fix her sights on religious orders when she resented, feared and detested every living human being, and, most of all, complained about her lot in life?