KING FELIX
But you would only pick it up subliminally. And who would be catching this accidental, purely accidental, juxtaposition? Only children, the little children of the Southland. It wouldn't mean anything to them; they would apprehend no two-word cypher, and even if they did they wouldn't understand what it meant, who it referred to.
But I had seen it and I knew who it referred to. It must be only synchronicity, as Jung calls it, I thought. Coincidence, without intent.
Or had the signal gone out? Out over the airwaves by one of the largest TV stations in the world, NBC's Los Angeles outlet, reaching many thousands of children with this split-second information which would be processed by the right hemispheres of their brains: received and stored and perhaps decoded, below the threshold of consciousness where many things lay slumbering and stored. And Eric and Linda Lampton had nothing to do with this. Just some board man, some technician at NBC with a whole stack of commercials to run, in any order he saw fit. It would have to be VALIS itself responsible, if anything had arranged the juxtaposition intentionally, VALIS which itself was information.
Maybe I had seen VALIS just now, riding a commercial and then a kids' cartoon.
The message has been sent out again, I said to myself.
Two days later Linda Lampton phoned me; I hadn't heard from the Lamptons since the tragedy. Linda sounded excited and happy.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
"Wonderful," I said. "How far along are you?"
"Eight months."
"Gee," I said, thinking, It won't be long.
"It won't be long now," Linda said.
"Are you hoping for a boy this time?" I said.
Linda said, "VALIS says it'll be another girl."
"Is Mini -- "
"He died, I'm sorry to say. There was no chance, not with what he had. Isn't it wonderful? Another child?"
"Do you have a name picked out?" I said.
"Not yet," Linda said.
On the TV that night I happened to catch a commercial for dog food. Dog food! At the very end, after listing various kinds of animals for which the company makes food -- I forget the name of the company -- a final coupling is stated:
"For the shepherd and the sheep."
A German shepherd dog is shown on the left and a great sheep on the right; immediately the station cut to another commercial which began with a sailboat silently passing across the screen. On the white sail I saw a small black emblem. Without looking more closely I knew what it was. On the sail the makers of the boat had placed a fish sign.
Shepherd and the sheep and then the fish, juxtaposed as had been KING FELIX. I don't know. I lack Kevin's faith and Fat's madness. But did I see consciously two quick messages fired off by VALIS in rapid succession, intended to strike us subliminally, one message really, telling us that the time had come? I don't know what to think. Maybe I am not required to think anything, or to have faith, or to have madness; maybe all I need to do -- all that is asked of me -- is to wait. To wait and to stay awake.
I waited, and one day I got a phonecall from Horselover Fat: a phonecall from Tokyo. He sounded healthy and excited and full of energy, and amused at my surprise to be hearing from him.
"Micronesia," he said.
"What?" I said, thinking that he had reverted back to the koine Greek again. And then I realized that he was referring to the group of small islands in the Pacific. "Oh," I said. "You've been there. The Carolines and Marshall Islands."
Fat said, "I'm going there; I haven't been, yet. The AI voice, the voice which I hear -- it told me to look among the Micronesian Islands."
"Aren't they sort of little?" I said.
"That's why they call them that." He laughed.
"How many islands?" I asked, thinking ten or twenty.
"More than two thousand."
"Two thousand!" I felt dismay. "You could look forever. Can't the AI voice narrow it down?"
"I'm hoping it will. Maybe to Guam; I'm flying to Guam and starting there. By the time I'm finished, I'll get to see where a lot of World War Two took place."
I said, "Interesting that the AI voice is back to using Greek words."
"Mikros meaning small," Fat said, "and nesoi meaning islands. Maybe you're right; maybe it's just its propensity for reverting to Greek. But it's worth a try."
"You know what Kevin would say," I said. "About the simple, unspoiled native girls in those two thousand islands."
"I'll be the judge of that," Fat said.
He rang off and I hung up the phone feeling better; it was good news to hear from him, and to find him sounding so hearty.
I have a sense of the goodness of men, these days. I don't know where this sense came from -- unless it came from Fat's phonecall -- but I feel it. This is March again, now. I asked myself, Is Fat having another experience? Is the beam of pink light back, firing new and vaster information to him? Is it narrowing his search down?
His original experience had come in March, at the day after the vernal equinox. "Vernal," of course, means "spring." And "equinox" means the time when the sun's center crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere of equal length. So Horselover Fat encountered God or Zebra or VALIS or his own immortal self on the first day of the year which has a longer stretch of light than of darkness. Also, according to some scholars, it is the actual day of birth of Christ.
Seated before my TV set I watched and waited for another message, I, one of the members of the little Rhipidon Society which still, in my mind, existed. Like the satellite in miniature in the film Valis, the microform of it run over by the taxi as if it were an empty beer can in the gutter, the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself. Kevin had expressed this thought. The divine intrudes where you least expect it.
"Look where you least expect to find it," Kevin had told Fat one time. How do you do that? It's a contradiction.
One night I dreamed I owned a small cabin directly on the water, an ocean this time; the water extended forever. And this cabin did not resemble any I had ever seen; it seemed more like a hut such as I had seen in movies about the South Pacific. And, as I awoke, the distinct thought entered my mind:
Garlands of flowers, singing and dancing, and the recital of myths, tales, and poetry.
Ilater remembered where I had read those words. In the article on Micronesian Cultures in the Britannica. The voice had spoken to me, reminding me of the place to which Horselover Fat had gone. In his search.
My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.
Appendix
Tractates Cryptica Scriptura
1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.
2. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.
3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
4. Matter is plastic in the face of mind.
5. One by one he draws us out of the world.
6. The Empire never ended.
7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.