After Thomas left him, Phil tried to write a book about his experience. He had recently been asked to add to a collection of novels attributed to imaginary writers, like Nabokov’s Sebastian Knight and Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, and thought that such an approach was perfect for his subject. He would take up the pen under the name of Hawthorne Abendsen, the renowned author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Whenever Phil reread one of his own novels, he was inevitably stunned by the prophetic nature of his writing. In 1960, he had imagined that someone could gain access to reality merely by chancing to gaze on a piece of jewelry and that a novel that to all appearances seemed to be describing an imaginary world could mysteriously yet irrefutably reveal a truth that lay hidden from human eyes. And when, as he was writing the final pages of that book, the I Ching assured him everything he thought he was imagining was actually true, he inserted the oracle’s pronouncement into his text without understanding what it meant. Now, fourteen years later, he understood. He was Hawthorne Abendsen. It was only logical that Hawthorne Abendsen should now come back and say, “Yes, all that was true,” and convince the world that it was so.
A sequel to The Man in the High Castle seemed a natural to Phil. Since it was his best-known book, the only one to have won a prize, there was perhaps money to be made in continuing the story. The novel would open with Abendsen having reached the end of his rope—sick and penniless, abandoned by his wife and children, beset by burglars, and persecuted by the cryptototalitarian regime against which he had been speaking out for all those years, to no avail. He was a voice crying out in the wilderness, but he cried out no longer. He was lying low. And then …
And then what?
And then everything got complicated and the novel broke down. Phil Dick soon discovered an enormous difference between The Man in the High Castle and its long-awaited sequel. In 1970, he had been fabricating, or at least that is what he thought he had been doing. He had been free to invent, or so he believed. This time, he had to tell the truth. He couldn’t get it wrong.
And so he started taking notes to tease it out, and once he started, he never stopped. He set aside the novel and put away his hand-me-down typewriter, and night after night, delving deep into the pages of his trusty Encyclopedia Britannica, his headphones blasting John Dowland and Olivia Newton-John into his ears, he did what God had placed him on this earth to do: he spun hypotheses.
* * *
When I say that he never stopped, I mean it literally. The note-taking would occupy him for the eight years he had left to live. Some of these writings he later destroyed, but around eight thousand pages remain. No one has read them all; he himself never did. Nor did Lawrence Sutin, his scrupulous biographer, who admits to having resorted to a sort of random sampling technique to cull the material and come up with the selection of excerpts that eventually saw publication. The excerpts give a good sense of the restless themes that haunted Dick throughout these years, but unavoidably they truncate the long and breathless runs of text, often fifty or sixty pages long, that he produced in the course of those sleepless nights that ended only when utter exhaustion forced him to put down his pen.
He called these notes his “Exegesis.” In theological terminology the word has a precise meaning, of which he of course was well aware. It refers to a work of doctrinal interpretation of a sacred text. And a sacred text (allowing that such a thing exists in the first place) is a text recognized as having a divine origin, inspired if not actually dictated by the Holy Spirit—the looser definition allowing for some slight margin of initiative, and therefore of error, on the part of the human redactor. A sacred text therefore, this one qualification aside, speaks the truth, and it does so in each and every one of its parts. Catholics hold such a text to be “infallible,” in something of the same way that the Jewish mystic operates on the radical premise—an utter certainty as far as he is concerned—that nothing in the Torah is there by chance: for the Cabalist, each word opens a door to He who is.
Bishop Pike was fond of saying that nothing holds greater fascination for those interested in the sciptural religions than the study of the formation of their canons, which is to say, the process by which their texts came to be declared sacred. When, how, and by whom was the Pentateuch written? When, how, and by whom were the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John granted canonical status while other texts were declared apocryphal, banished to the margins where the James Pikes of every age have found their greatest inspiration.
Phil attributed a divine origin to the bursts of information that had been shooting into his brain ever since February 1974. God, whom he coyly called Valis, spoke to him as He had spoken to Moses, Mohammed, and a few others whom He had chosen to receive His Word. He was once again seeking a writer to transcribe His message, this time in a modern form that He believed would best suit His latest revelation. That form was science fiction. Phil couldn’t quite understand God’s utter confidence in his professional capacities. He was more than willing to transcribe—but what? What canonical corpus would his Exegesis explicate?
The possibilities were endless: there were of course the books that appeared in his dreams, the words he retained from them and the information he managed to remember—concerning his son’s hernia, for example. There were his own books as well and the new discoveries he made in rereading them. And then there were those sudden, blinding flashes of certainty: of having lived in AD 70, of having run the anti-Christ out of the White House. But other certainties, no less blinding, had immediately followed, and only by carefully and tediously stitching all of them together—much the way he used to cobble together a novel by combining plot lines from two earlier short stories—could he reconcile them with one another. Now that Thomas was gone, his world had become confused again. Without that gentle soul to hold the threads together, the tapestry of truth he had revealed was unraveling. Left to his own devices, Phil couldn’t understand why the world, which, after his own anamnesis and Nixon’s fall, had been brought once again into line with the divine plan, hadn’t changed more visibly. He tried to reassure himself with the thought that the changes that had taken place might be every bit as radical as they were subtle and that it was the mission of his Exegesis to tame and harness them. His vocation perhaps demanded that he grope his way amid the uncertainties, guided only by intermittent illumination, that he feel, even as he labored for the greater glory of God, he was on the wrong track, an unworthy servant unequal to the task that He had set before him. When the moment came, the Holy Spirit would sort everything out and dictate to him the revelation that would convert all humanity. All he had to do in the meantime was write everything down—all his doubts and all his conjectures. The corpus on which he would write his commentary would be everything he was living through now and had lived through in the past, everything he dreamed, everything that went through his head: in other words, all the information received and processed by the program called Philip K. Dick.
* * *
Wary of speaking about what had happened to him, he confided in no one but Tessa and a woman with whom he was exchanging letters—she was writing a thesis on him—but had never met. Otherwise he made only vague allusions, humorous quips he could easily take back.
In the fall of 1974, his young admirer Paul Williams, who had made a name for himself as a journalist with Rolling Stone, proposed to the magazine’s editor doing a long profile of Dick, presenting him as a guiding light of the American counterculture. Having got the go-ahead, Williams headed down from San Francisco to Fullerton for a marathon interview, his undisguised goal to make its subject a famous man. Aware of the stakes, Phil, who had toyed with the idea of coming out of the closet as a mystic visionary, realized that to do so might alienate the very public he at last had a chance to reach. Socially maladroit though he was, he always understood what his interviewers expected of him, and knowing that Williams wanted the eccentric rebel, not the religious visionary, he was careful not to show his hand. And Williams, for his part, with his journalistic instincts, knew that no one would be interested in a didactic article about Dick’s books; far better to give a sense of the strange workings of his mind. It didn’t matter what particular topic they talked about. The break-in of 1971? That would do just fine. The victim of the break-in would inspire readers to rush out and get ahold of the writer’s novels. And that is precisely what happened. With Williams egging him on, Dick improvised a startling four-day-long monologue that resembled nothing so much as that famous cube the Hungarian architect Reno Rubik had just invented—dozens of configurations, from the nearly plausible to the purely lunatic, were tried out, rejected, tried out again, and combined with others. Knowing that the average Rolling Stone reader was predisposed to believe any story about the White House plumbers, Dick obligingly elaborated his theory that the Nixon gang was behind the break-in on Hacienda Way, and then, like a demented trial lawyer who decides to switch sides as soon as he senses he has swayed the jury, he found arguments to shoot that theory down. Those whom he accused, exculpated, then reindicted included, by turns, the John Birch Society, the Black Panthers, a sect of religious fanatics who objected to the writings of Bishop Pike, the next-door neighbors, local dopers, the police, extraterrestrials, and last but not least, himself. For nearly three years, he had obsessed over the question of who was responsible, but in the six months immediately preceding the interview other, more pressing, more cosmically important matters had entered the picture: perhaps he thought he might have some fun applying the investigative methods he had since developed for his Exegesis to what he now regarded as the relatively trivial matter of the break-in. Williams left Fullerton delighted, convinced that he had the makings of a truly mind-blowing article. By coincidence, the issue in which his interview with Dick appeared also contained one of the decade’s great journalistic scoops—Patty Hearst’s confession; everyone in America bought the magazine that week and, when they came to the end of the Hearst article and flipped the page, they discovered the writer who had managed to turn his burglarized bungalow into the epicenter of the universe’s every mystery. From one day to the next, Dick became if not a celebrity then at least “that guy, you know, that nut Rolling Stone had an article about,” and everyone knew who you meant.
* * *
When Williams got back to San Francisco, he had thought he might round out the interview by conducting his own investigation. He went to the San Rafael police station, looked at their records, spoke to various police officers, and discovered exactly what he had expected he would discover: nothing. Dick in all likelihood was the victim of a completely ordinary burglary, the kind that happens in Marin County, California, a little over twenty-five times a day, on average.
Williams, who had decided to emphasize his subject’s feverish imagination and would have been embarrassed to discover that he had been speaking the truth, was reassured by this nondiscovery. Phil, however, remained unconvinced. Without excluding the possibility of a garden-variety break-in, he remarked that if that wasn’t what it was, then the plumbers, or the John Birch Society, or the extraterrestrials, or whoever was behind it would have made damn sure it at least looked like one. Similarly, he professed not to be surprised when, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, he finally got his hands on his FBI file, expecting to find it stuffed with twenty years’ worth of reports, and found that it contained only one document—the letter that, in the early 1950s, even before he had met George Smith and George Scruggs, he had written to the Soviet physicist Alexander Topchev, in the hopes of learning more about supposed flaws in Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The presence of this single document, and not a particularly compromising one at that, proved one thing and one thing only: that the FBI had purged its files before opening them up to the public; the law that was supposed to put an end to Nixon’s police state was a red herring.
As comforting as he found this explanation, Phil still had to face the possibility that the file on his encounter with God might contain exactly the same thing as the police files on the break-in or his FBI files—in other words, nothing. Well, actually, either nothing or what comes down to the same thing—the product of an imagination that, depending on your inclination, you can see as either marvelously fertile or pathetically deranged.
* * *
Within him was a man inspired by God, who had chosen him to carry His word to late-twentieth-century America. But there was another man in him as well, a man who never tired of denouncing the illusions that the other man, the Inspired One, was all too willing to succumb to. Night after night, these two selves fought over the Exegesis—one of them as the lord of the castle, defending his position, the other as its assailant, laying siege to the former’s arguments. Because he didn’t know which of these two selves to side with, Phil was unable to find the words to convey what had happened to him in a way that others would understand. Still, he nursed the hope that he could end this solipsistic standoff by letting the two voices battling within him each have their say. Within the space of a few weeks in 1976, he wrote a novel called Valisystem A, which no publisher was interested in (it was published in 1985 under the title Radio Free Albemuth). It revolves around a Berkeley record salesman named Nicholas Brady and his old friend the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Nick’s life has it all—the infected wisdom tooth, the golden fish, the phosphenes that form themselves into paintings from the Hermitage, the photocopied article, the foul-mouthed radio (“Nick is a prick, Nick is a dick”), the baby son with the strangulated hernia. As for Phil, he plays the part of friend and confidant, skeptical yet sympathetic. He plays this role in later works as well, whereas the Nicholas Brady character becomes Horselover Fat, an alter ago whose name is an English translation of the Greco-Teutonic Philip Dick (in German, dick means “fat,” while Philip in Greek means “lover of horses”).
Horselover Fat, then, is a madman who has seen God, and Phil Dick is his rational friend. Fat glosses his visions in the Exegesis, while Phil discusses Fat’s Exegesis in drafts for his novels. Fat sees himself as a new Isaiah; Phil sees him as a paranoid schizophrenic. Phil considers himself lucid; as for Fat, if the whole world thinks he’s crazy, that’s just fine by him. He insists that nevertheless the truth is on his side, whereupon Phil shakes his head in dismay—and then everything starts all over again, the carousel turning round and round and round and round … till the end of time.
Scrupulously evenhanded, Fats assembles all the arguments proving he has gone crazy and all those proving he has fallen into the hands of the living God. Even this effort at impartiality cuts both ways. One day he takes it as an encouraging sign of mental health, since crazy people generally think they are completely sane. But the next day, he panics, for he remembers having heard somewhere that one of the first symptoms of insanity is the fear of going crazy.
Phil matches Fat’s roster of the various spiritual squatters who may have taken up residence inside his brain with a list of his own, cataloging the possible causes of his alter ego’s psychological decline. Excessive distress and anxiety could have led him to withdraw into himself, like one of the autistic characters that appear in so many of his books. Or maybe the culprit is too much dope. For twenty years he has treated his body like a cocktail shaker for assorted chemical substances, and now he is being handed the bill, along with a fortune cookie rolled up inside of which is none other than the divine presence Himself. Harlan Ellison has a crude formula to describe this sort of trajectory: “Took drugs. Saw God. BFD [Big Fucking Deal].”
Phil couldn’t decide whether to take comfort in or be depressed by the fact that his adventure was so commonplace. The drugs he had taken during the 1960s, he was convinced, formed a chemical soup in which his brain now stewed. All of California, in fact, was crawling with freaks like him who nursed their cherished acid flashbacks while mumbling their favorite mantras over and over.
Acid flashback—it was the all-purpose explanation. After the federal government outlawed LSD-25 in 1967 and public opinion turned sharply against it, the conservative press began to treat this relatively rare phenomenon as though it were a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of everyone who had ever taken acid, casting it as a threat every bit as fearsome as, some fifteen years later, the human immunodeficiency virus, with its long incubation period, would turn out to be. No one who had ever taken acid could be sure he could close the book on that experience. Horrific stories were told of people who, succumbing to peer pressure, had taken LSD in their student years and later, having become junior executives at IBM or General Motors, would suddenly and without warning, right in the middle of a business meeting, find themselves tripping out of their minds, with telephone cords morphing into snakes and their friendly coworkers into malevolent robots. Once in a while, it was said, some poor guy whose drug experimentation of years before finally caught up with him would take a hatchet and try to massacre everyone around him. In the seventies, whenever a particularly gruesome murder occurred “acid flashback” would be the first explanation the police would trot out before the press. Phil was not impervious to this line of reasoning and for a while looked to his 1964 acid trip, his one and only experience with the drug, as the possible source of his divine obsession. At the time, he had thought the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, had arrived, and for eight hours he had sobbed and pleaded and prayed in Latin. And now they were playing the sequel for him, a film that would last not eight hours but eight more years. Thanks, Sandoz.
Sad as it was, this explanation seemed the most cogent to him, except for one small detail, which Fat pointed out: who had ever heard of acid’s being able to make someone speak Latin who didn’t know it already? Who had ever heard of anyone having flashbacks in dialects of ancient Greek? Of course, anyone high enough on acid or deep enough asleep can believe he is speaking Greek, or Latin, or Sanskrit—or Martian, for that matter. But in 1964 Ray Nelson, his friend and sometime collaborator, really had heard him blubbering on in Latin, a fact that pushed the origin of the problem ten years further back without doing anything to actually resolve it—of course, Nelson was on acid himself at the time. If prayers came out of Dick’s mouth back then, now it was words that came into his mind, words that he didn’t understand when they appeared in his dreams but that he transcribed phonetically on awakening. He discovered they were Koine Greek. You can be as skeptical as you want about all this, Fat told Phil, but then explain this to me: how does a guy living in California in 1974 suddenly start thinking in the language in which Saint Paul wrote his Epistles?
And more generally, Fat insisted, how do you explain the presence in our brains of information that doesn’t belong there? It’s too easy just to blame drugs or to say that “an encounter with God is to mental illness what death is to cancer: the logical outcome of a deteriorating illness process.” The real question is whether my experience in February 1974 was a theophany, “a self-disclosure by the divine.” If God exists, so does theophany. “Moses did not create the burning bush; Elijah, on Mount Horeb, did not generate the low murmuring voice.” I realize, Fat said, that distinguishing true theophany from hallucination—a far more common occurrence—is a delicate matter. But I would like to propose a basis for judgment: if the voice—let’s say a voice is involved—communicates information to its subject, information that the subject didn’t and couldn’t otherwise know, then I’d say the phenomenon on our hands is real and not fake.
Agreed?
Phil was willing to agree, but with reservations. For one thing, he thought that Fat was somewhat overstating the extent of his ignorance. One night as they sparred over the Exegesis, he caught Fat marveling at being able, in his dreams, to understand German, a language he spoke fluently. He suspected that Fat, who was never very good at keeping track of what happened when, would often reverse the sequence of events: for example, after spending a few hours paging through his Encyclopedia Britannica and finally locating some vital piece of information, he might then doze off, dream about the precious piece of information he had just discovered, and wake up having completely forgotten everything he had been doing before. He would go back to the encyclopedia, find that same piece of information, and express astonishment at the amazing coincidence. Instead of seeing the hand of God at work in these various coincidences and puzzling abilities, Phil suggested, Fat might want to look inside himself, at all the stuff buried in his unconscious. Three decades of psychoanalysis—Jungian, it’s true—couldn’t rid Fat of his magical, primitive conceptions of the nature of dreams. Refusing to see them as a brown-bag meeting where the only lunch you get to eat is the one you’ve brought with you, he kept looking for messages in them, messages from outside himself. Hence occurrences like the one with the delivery girl with a golden fish around her neck: after she had gone and he took the painkillers she had brought him, he dozed off and saw the number 842 in flaming letters. The minute he woke up, he set about trying to find out what might have happened in the year 842 BC, imagining who he might have been in pre-Mycenaean days—all this instead of remembering the price of the medication the girl had delivered. She had even had to repeat it: eight dollars and forty-two cents.
You got me there, Fat admitted. Now explain the Greek.
Here Phil appealed to the notion of a collective unconscious, phylogenic memories. He realized this tactic was tricky, moving the argument from the strictly rational terrain on which he had wanted to confine it. Still, playing the Jungian card was perhaps the only way he had left to keep God out of the picture.
Okay then, replied Fat, with that thin smile that always accompanied his most crushing argument, what about Chris’s hernia? Did the collective unconscious warn me about that?
Phil scratched his head. He couldn’t deny the facts or that he found the whole thing troubling. But hey, troubling things happened sometimes. Every day, rational people are troubled by the discovery that they’ve had a premonitory dream or by the apparent clairvoyance of a card reader. Nancy and he were troubled when the Santa Barbara medium brought up the KGB restaurateur from Berkeley. Of course these sorts of events are troubling, but not so troubling as to upset your entire worldview, which has heretofore excluded the idea of extrasensory perception. Still, they are troubling.
* * *
Faced with Fat’s inexplicable knowledge of his little boy’s hernia, Phil counterattacked with the “know it by its fruits” argument. “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” Christ warns in Matthew 7:15. “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.”
Here, Phil told Fat, is the true criterion, the only way to distinguish between the man inspired by God and the mere lunatic. Of course, Christ was speaking of evil false prophets, of pied piper types like Hitler or Jim Jones, but the argument holds for the good guys, too, guys like you who think that hearing voices makes them prophets when in fact they are merely going off the rails: show us the fruits of your commerce with God, Phil asked Fat. Okay, you dreamed in Greek, you fired your agent, you’ve started trimming your nose hairs …
But I knew about the hernia!
Okay, but can you honestly say that knowing about Chris’s hernia has made you a better person? For twenty years you’ve been speaking rapturously of empathy, of charity, of agape; you’ve been holding forth in long letters to your ex-wives, peppering your sermons with lines from Saint Paul. Well then, let’s see what he says. Take his first Epistle to the Corinthians: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries”—hear that, Fat?—“and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Fat lowered his head in sadness as he listened to those words. Phil pursued his advantage. I know you’re not evil, he told him, that you give to the poor, that you write checks to charitable organizations, that the suffering of children and cats can move you to tears. But that doesn’t alter the fact that you remain incapable of empathy. Try as you do, and God knows you have tried, you have no more connection to others than you have to the real, sensorial world, the true world, from which a thick pane of glass still separates you. That’s what mortal sin is and it isn’t even your fault. You’re more a victim than you are guilty. Sin is not a moral choice but a sickness of the mind that dooms it forever to have no commerce with anyone but itself, and thus to eternal repetition. You’ve got this sickness, Phil told Fat. Your mind is under house arrest; since the day you were born you’ve been confined to the labyrinth of your brain. What you’re hearing now, all you’ve ever heard, and all you’ll ever hear are the magnetic tapes of your own voice being played back to you in closed-circuit transmission. Don’t kid yourself: that is exactly what you are hearing at this very moment. It’s your own voice that’s telling you this. You sometimes let yourself be fooled by it, because the voice wouldn’t have been able to stand itself all these years without learning how to fake other voices, to echo them, to ventriloquize so that you think you’re speaking with other people. The truth is that you’re alone in there, just as Palmer Eldritch is alone in the world that he has emptied of its substance and whose inhabitants all bear his stigmata. You’re alone the way Nixon was alone in the Oval Office with his hidden tape recorders whose reels started spinning every time he opened his mouth. Nixon at least was lucky in a way: he was forced to hand over his tapes, others listened to them, and then he got turned out of his bunker. No one is going to do you that favor. You’re going to be able to go on listening to yourself, disagreeing with yourself, and telling yourself you’re right until the day you die, and no one is going to stop you.
And that’s what you mean when you say you agree with me?
That’s exactly what I mean. And besides, you’re right. At least, I can’t prove you’re wrong. No one can do that. Your whole system rests on the kind of reasoning that philosophers call a “sophism”—an argument that, though not necessarily correct, is logically unassailable. In your case, it goes as follows: “Maybe I’m not a prophet, but then by the same token neither was Isaiah. Maybe I confuse the gurglings of my unconscious with the voice of God, but the same could be said of Saint Paul. Tell me what difference there is between the light that blinded him on the road to Damascus and what I saw in the spring of 1974 in my apartment in Fullerton, Orange County, California. In the name of what and on what grounds can you distinguish one from the other? I can’t guarantee you that you’re wrong not to believe me, but I can guarantee you that you wouldn’t have believed Paul. You would have shrugged your shoulders and maybe talked about epileptic fits or blows of the cane, just the way so many pious Jews and civilized Greeks did.” Okay, Fat, I can’t counter those explanations. Nor can I counter the objections of the ecology freaks who, when I tell them that it’s ridiculous to grant trees and animals the same legal rights as people, point out that not so long ago it was considered just as ludicrous to grant those rights to women or to Blacks. I have no answer, either, for those who, if I concede that modern technology would have seemed like magic to our ancestors, oblige me to admit that what now seems inexplicable to us—troubling, as you put it so well—and what I try to ignore or sweep under the carpet will one day be just another branch of science: those who deny the existence of extrasensory perception today would have condemned Galileo. Personally, I doubt it, but it’s a good argument, and now I’ll keep quiet.
You can keep quiet, but I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I should read a few pages of my Exegesis. They speak for themselves and eloquently attest to their author’s insanity. Compare the complication, the contradictions, the implausibility of his theories with the solidity, the clarity of Paul’s Epistles. There is something self-evident about the truth, something that, apart from everything else, lets you know that it is true. The same goes for falsehood, and anyone who can’t sense this has lost all faculties of judgment. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?
Of course that’s what I’m thinking, and I know that you’re going to say: that in thinking this, I prove nothing and merely demonstrate my laziness. The fact is I have your Exegesis right here in front of my nose, the ink still wet, whereas between me and the New Testament lie two thousand years of blind custom and habit. If I could somehow read it with fresh eyes, I’d see that nothing is so twisted and so contrary to common sense as Christian doctrine. The Greek gods have something human about them, something completely familiar, a little like those movies that people flock to because they are about the lives of people just like them but make those lives seem more glamorous. Christianity, on the other hand, goes against everything we believe we know about the way the world works. As I myself used to tell Anne back when we were attending church at Inverness, this crucified God, this ritualistic cannibalism that is supposed to transform the human species resembles nothing so much as science fiction. Christianity is every bit as unbelievable as science fiction, and if you’re thinking that that’s why it just may well be true, you wouldn’t be the first person to think so.
All the same, you do find it strange, don’t you, that my revelations are so much like my science fiction novels? Or maybe you think I’ve simply started to believe the stories I used to make up.
In fact that is what I think, but I’d put it another way. I’d say that you never made up any of it. I’d say this revelation of yours began invading the world, without your knowing it, through your novels. The more I think about it, the more it all strikes me as … how can I put this? Plausible? Logical? Cogent? Let’s just say it doesn’t surprise me that God would choose science fiction as His vehicle and put you in the driver’s seat. That’s always His way. He uses base materials—the stone that the masons have rejected. When He decides to choose His people, He doesn’t take the Greeks or the Persians. No, He goes out and finds some obscure tribe wandering in the desert, nomads no one has ever heard of. And when He decides to send His son to His people, it’s exactly the same. Everyone expects the triumphal arrival of a royal scion, and instead it all happens on the sly, among the down and out, in the annex of some motel in Bethlehem. One of the few things that we know about God’s ways is that He manifests Himself where we least expect Him. That’s what He Himself says so clearly in Ubik. Runciter doesn’t use encyclicals to get his message across, he uses TV ads and graffiti on bathroom walls. One thing you can be sure of is that if God decides to speak to people today, He won’t start with the pope or any other of His official representatives. And if for reasons of His own, He decides to speak to an American writer, it won’t be Norman Mailer or Susan Sontag but some hack toiling away in the dark, grinding out cheap novels that no one takes seriously.
Well, if that’s the case, joked Fat, you’ll have to admit that I have conducted my career brilliantly to this point. On the other hand, all of that sounds a lot like the rantings of a loser, wouldn’t you say?
Yes. But God might want to use the rantings of a loser to serve His designs. That would be just like Him—what with His inscrutable ways, and all that. You see, the problem with faith is that it never gives you any reason to call it quits. If you believe in the resurrection of Christ, then you have no grounds to deny the miracles—His virgin birth, for example. And if you believe in the Holy Virgin, then it’s silly not to let her show up at Lourdes or Fatima or any of those other villages from which millions of pilgrims return transfigured. If you believe in these visions, in miracle cures and holy medallions, then why not in reincarnation too, or in the Great Pyramid’s occult influence on world historical events, or in your Exegesis? Your trick, Fat, is to call yourself the bath water and then point out that, if it gets thrown out, the baby goes with it. But hang on a minute. What would happen if I agreed to sacrifice the baby?
You mean …
That’s right. What if God doesn’t exist?
Well, in that case, my Exegesis would be nothing but a load of crap.
But then the Gospels would be too. Isn’t that what you’d say next?
Exactly, and that’s basically what Saint Paul says: If Christ wasn’t resurrected, everything that I’ve said to you is nonsense. So there’s no difference between Isaiah and some paranoid schizophrenic, between Saint Paul and a lunatic who thinks he’s Saint Paul—me, for example. All of us in the loony bin together. Does that make you happy?
You know very well that it doesn’t. If you’re right, then we both lose.
And then?
I don’t know. I guess you’ve got me.