And then we received a second mailgram. This time from Portland, Oregon. It read:
KING FELIX
Nothing more. Just those two startling words. Well? I thought. Did he? Is that what he's telling us? Does the Rhipidon Society reconvene in plenary session after all this time?
It hardly mattered to us. Collectively and individually we barely remembered. It was a part of our lives we preferred to forget. Too much pain; too many hopes down the tube.
When Fat arrived in LAX, which is the designation for the Los Angeles Airport, the four of us met him: me, Kevin, David and Kevin's foxy girl friend Ginger, a tail girl with blonde hair braided and with bits of red ribbon in the braids, a colorful lady who liked to drive miles and miles late at night to drink Irish coffee at some out-of-the-way Irish bar.
With all the rest of the people in the world we milled around and conversed, and then all at once, unexpectedly, there came Horselover Fat striding toward us in the midst of the gang of other passengers. Grinning, carrying a briefcase; our friend back home. He wore a suit and tie, a good-looking East Coast suit, fashionable in the extreme. It shocked us to see him so well-dressed; we had anticipated, I guess, some emaciated hollow-eyed remnant scarcely able to hobble down the corridor.
After we'd hugged him and introduced him to Ginger we asked him how he'd been.
"Not bad," he said.
We ate at the restaurant at a top-of-the-line nearby hotel. Not much talk took place, for some reason. Fat seemed withdrawn, but not actually depressed. Tired, I decided. He had traveled a long way; it was inscribed on his face. Those things show up; they leave their mark.
"What's in the briefcase?" I said when our after-dinner coffee came.
Pushing aside the dishes before him, Fat laid down the briefcase and unsnapped it; it wasn't key-locked. In it he had manila folders, one of which he lifted out after sorting among them; they bore numbers. He examined it a last time to be sure he had the right one and then he handed it to me.
"Look in it," he said, smiling slightly, as you do when you have given someone a present which you know will please him and he is unwrapping it before your eyes.
I opened it. In the folder I found four 8 X 10 glossy photos, obviously professionally done; they looked like the kind of stills that the publicity departments of movie studios put out.
The photos showed a Greek vase, on it a painting of a male figure who we recognized as Hermes.
Twined around the vase the double helix confronted us, done in red glaze against a black background. The DNA molecule. There could be no mistake.
"Twenty-three or -four hundred years ago," Fat said. "Not the picture but the krater, the pottery."
"A pot," I said.
"I saw it in a museum at Athens. It's authentic. That's not a matter of my opinion; I'm not qualified to judge such matters; its authenticity has been established by the museum authorities. I talked with one of them. He hadn't realized what the design shows; he was very interested when I discussed it with him. This form of vase, the krater, was the shape used later as the baptismal font. That was one of the Greek words that came into my head in March 1974, the word 'krater.' I heard it connected with another Greek word: 'poros.' The words 'poros krater' essentially mean 'limestone font.'"
There could be no doubt; the design, predating Christianity, was Crick and Watson's double helix model at which they had arrived after so many wrong guesses, so much trial-and-error work. Here it was, faithfully reproduced.
"Well?" I said.
"The so-called intertwined snakes of the caduceus. Originally the caduceus, which is still the symbol of medicine was the staff of -- not Hermes -- but -- " Fat paused, his eyes bright. "Of Asklepios. It has a very specific meaning, besides that of wisdom, which the snakes allude to; it shows that the bearer is a sacred person and not to be molested... which is why Hermes, the messenger of the gods, carried it."
None of us said anything for a time.
Kevin started to utter something sarcastic, something in his dry, witty way, but he did not; he only sat without speaking.
Examining the 8 X 10 glossies, Ginger said, "How lovely!"
"The greatest physician in all human history," Fat said to her. "Asklepios, the founder of Greek medicine. The Roman Emperor Julian -- known to us as Julian the Apostate because he renounced Christianity -- considered Asklepios as God or a god; Julian worshipped him. If that worship had continued, the entire history of the Western world would have basically changed."
"You won't give up," I said to Fat.
"No," Fat agreed. "I never will. I'm going back -- I ran out of money. When I've gotten the funds together, I'm going back. I know where to look, now. The Greek islands. Lemnos, Lesbos, Crete. Especially Crete. I dreamed I descended in an elevator -- in fact I had this dream twice -- and the elevator operator recited in verse, and there was a huge plate of spaghetti with a three-pronged fork, a trident, stuck in it... that would be Ariadne's thread by which she led Theseus out of the maze under Minos after he slew the Minotaur. The Minotaur, being half man and half beast is a monster which represents the demented deity Samael, in my opinion, the false demiurge of the Gnostics' system."
"The two-word mailgram," I said. "'KING FELIX.'"
Fat said, "I didn't find him."
"I see," I said.
"But he is somewhere," Fat said. "I know it. I will never give up." He returned the photos to their manila folder, put it back in the briefcase and closed it up.
Today he is in Turkey. He sent us a postcard showing the mosque which used to be the great Christian church called St. Sophia or Hagia Sophia, one of the wonders of the world, even though the roof collapsed during the Middle Ages and had to be rebuilt. You'll find schematics of its unique construction in most comprehensive textbooks on architecture. The central portion of the church seems to float, as if rising to heaven; anyhow that was the idea the Roman emperor Justinian had when he built it. He personally supervised the construction and he himself named it, a code name for Christ.
We will hear from Horselover Fat again. Kevin says so and I trust his judgment. Kevin would know. Kevin out of all of us has the least irrationality and, what matters more, the most faith. This is something it took me a long time to understand about him.
Faith is strange. It has to do, by definition, with things you can't prove. For example, this last Saturday morning I had the TV set on; I wasn't really watching it, since on Saturday morning there's nothing but kids' shows, and anyhow I don't watch daytime TV; I sometimes find it diminishes my loneliness, so I do turn it on as background. Anyhow, last Saturday they ran the usual string of commercials and for some reason at one point my conscious attention was attracted; I stopped what I had been doing and became fully alert
The TV station had run an ad for a supermarket chain; on the screen the words FOOD KING appeared -- and then they cut instantly, rushing their film along as fast as possible so as to squeeze in as many commercial messages as possible; what came next was a Felix the Cat cartoon, an old black-and-white cartoon. One moment FOOD KING appeared on the screen and then almost instantly the words -- also in huge letters -- FELIX THE CAT.
There it had been, the juxtaposed cypher, and in the proper order: