Under Phil’s nervous gaze, Fat spent whole evenings immersed in his Exegesis. Like a man lost in some unknown territory who pores over whatever maps he finds in the glove compartment of his car—Michigan, Tanzania, the scenic byways of the Auvergne—he worked tirelessly trying to reconcile what had happened to him first to this, then to that form of spiritual experience or religious doctrine. His reference works, as he liked to announce grandly, ran the gamut from the Encyclopedia Britannica to the publications of the Church of Scientology, whose sales were fattening the pockets of fellow science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. He received catalogs from occult bookstores—the kind of place where Meister Eckhart rubbed elbows on a shelf with Madame Blavatsky. Thus armed and referenced, he spun out theory upon theory, each of which seeming as luminously plausible as the one before and the one after. Yet the novel that he told everyone he was going to write—the one that would be to the Exegesis what Christ’s parables were to His secret teachings and whose advance he had long ago spent—was going nowhere. Meanwhile, his only income was from translations of his older works, he had to pay Nancy’s alimony, and he and Tessa and Christopher were living hand to mouth. Tessa wanted to get a job, but Phil was dead set against it. He objected to her enrolling in the university to take a course in German, a language that he was using more and more often in their conversations without caring whether or not she understood what he was saying. He didn’t like her to leave the house, whether to go shopping or to take Christopher for a walk, or even to accompany him when he went out. He insisted on his own autonomy without conceding her any at all. Her thoughts and opinions mattered very little to him, yet he couldn’t stand her hiding them from him. He would ask her point-blank what was going on in her head and get angry if he suspected she was holding anything back, even though he himself had never offered the slightest explanation of what was going on in his all those months when Thomas had set up house inside his cranium and he had more or less stopped talking to Tessa, preferring to pass his days in front of the TV, exchanging asides and chuckles with his invisible companion. Not surprisingly, Tessa became angry and reproachful. Oblivious to his own role in their mutual unhappiness, he preferred to see it as part of a greater and more mysterious process whose significance defied rational explanation. The light had triumphed and reality had reclaimed its rightful place in the world, but everything seemed to be going downhill instead of getting better. His creative faculties were failing, his marriage was on the rocks, and now his car was ready to give up the ghost. It seemed the cycle of repetition in which he was trapped would go on forever.
Then he met a twenty-two-year-old named Doris, and, once again, he thought he had finally broken free. A chubby, determined young woman, Doris had just joined the Episcopal Church. She wanted to become a nun, she confided to him during the first of many long conversations they had in her studio apartment, whose walls were covered with religious posters. He thoroughly approved of that idea, even as he tried to figure out how to get her into bed with him. How wonderful life would be if they moved in together! They talked about theology, attended mass together, and participated in parish activities. Testing the waters with her, he complained that Tessa didn’t understand him, that he was suffocating in the petty bourgeois cocoon that she had spun about him. This got him nowhere with Doris, who saw the problem differently: he was simply tired of being married, she told him, and was behaving like a child. Figuring it was time to bring out the heavy artillery, he began telling her about his own religious experiences.
It was a long story, and she listened patiently, though a little too dispassionately, he thought. He hadn’t really known what to expect but was nevertheless hoping for something more enthusiastic than her comment that according to a Time magazine survey 40 percent of Americans claimed to have had a mystical experience at some point in their lives. Doris’s reticence stemmed from her scrupulous orthodoxy. She would have liked to accept his arguments and not dimiss the possibility that he had been charged with a prophetic mission, but her priest had warned her against what people were beginning to call “New Age” ideas. She wanted doctrinal assurances. Phil swore to her that his Exegesis had nothing whatsoever to do with Pike’s brand of syncretic religion, that he didn’t see himself as creating a new sect, that, on the contrary, everything he was telling her had firm grounding in the original meaning of Christian observance. His was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nevertheless, he insisted, the story of salvation wasn’t finished: there had been the age of the Father, of which the Old Testament spoke, then the age of the Son, depicted in the New. And now the age of the Holy Spirit was at hand. Did he mean, asked an anxious Doris, that he thought of his books as the third part of the Bible? Or that he considered himself a new Messiah? He laughed modestly. No, of course not, more like John the Baptist—a forerunner, a man on the cusp between ages. The greatest in the Old Covenant, the smallest in the New. The last of the prophets, the one who emerges at a time when everyone is lamenting that God no longer speaks to His people. The voice crying in the wilderness. If she read the Bible carefully, he told her, she would see that John the Baptist was a bearded man, too, burning with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Would she have believed him?
Less receptive to Fat’s rhetoric than Phil was, Doris dutifully asked herself that question but didn’t bother to answer it. Phil’s amorous feelings began to chill slightly. They heated up again in the spring of 1975, when she was diagnosed with lymphoma. Phil leapt into action, announcing that he wanted to live with her, take care of her, and never leave her side. What about Tessa? she objected. Her religious beliefs did not allow her to take the vows of marriage lightly. She forbade him to leave his wife and child, but they saw each other every day. In the evening, when he returned home, all he wanted to talk about was Doris’s illness, Doris’s piety, Doris’s sublime resignation. Doris’s doubts about his divine mission, on the other hand, he managed to forget, or, if he acknowledged them, it was to hold them up gratefully as a salutary lesson in humility. No human tresses had ever turned him on more than the wig that Doris wore in the months following her chemotherapy.
* * *
Finally, Tessa had enough and left, taking Christopher with her. Phil, busy talking with Tim Powers when his young brother-in-law came to get her things later that day, acted as though he didn’t care. Powers was worried about how he really felt, but Phil assured him that he was fine and refused to let him stay to keep him company.
That evening, he swallowed forty-nine tablets of digitalin, thirty capsules of Librium, and sixty of Apresoline, washing them down with half a bottle of wine; then he opened his veins and lay down in the garage, having first closed the door and started up the car.
There was a hitch: the car kept stalling out. Irritated, and seeing no reason to put up with all this discomfort—the exhaust fumes were escaping anyway—Phil dragged himself back into the house and into bed. A little later, his door was broken down by an emergency medical team. Earlier, disoriented, he had called the pharmacy to refill his prescription of Librium; suspicious, the pharmacist had called the emergency medical services. Later, Dick decided something ought to be written about pharmacists and the part they play in life’s grace.
His stomach was pumped and he was put on life support. At dawn, he regained consciousness. Lying on his back, he watching the EEG monitor at the head of his bed. The calm glowing line moving tirelessly across the black screen—that was who he was. Vague thoughts stirring about in his dull brain produced tiny, irregular spikes in the horizontal sweep of the glowing line. Losing himself in this spectacle, he tried to inflect the movement of the line by controlling the neural impulses emanating from his brain, the way one guides a toy electric car across the floor by remote control. At one point the spikes moved farther apart and the line became perfectly straight. It seemed to him that he had been staring for a long time at this straight line, whose peaceful, solid trace across the screen meant that he had died. Then, as though regretfully, the line took up its sinusoidal movement once more.
* * *
Three days later, an armed policeman pushed Phil’s wheelchair down the long corridor connecting the intensive care unit to the hospital’s psychiatric wing. Several hours went by without anyone’s paying any attention to him. He could walk without assistance, but for one reason or another the policeman had left him sitting in the wheelchair. So there Phil stayed, parked along a corridor, watching the parade: white-coated doctors and nurses—never the same ones—walked by at irregular intervals, interspersed among a more regular flow of people in bathrobes—always the same ones—who seemed to him reasonably wild-eyed. They were probably completing some ritual circuit. Lacking the energy to get up out of his wheelchair and see for himself exactly what they were up to, he contented himself with observing the particular rhythm of each of the patients as they walked past. The mentally ill, he noted, moved about at a constant pace—each person had only one speed. But some of them dragged themselves along while others were always running. Several times he saw a fat, disheveled woman pass by who in a curiously sophisticated voice told anyone who cared to listen that her husband had tried to poison her by pumping toxic gas under the door of her bedroom. Phil noted with amazement that he was hearing a continuous narrative, even though it came in small snatches that lasted only a few seconds each and were separated by fairly long stretches of time. He shook his head, trying to shoo this puzzlement away as one would an insect.
To fend off the suffering that he had not yet begun to feel but that he sensed all around him, he tried to think about his Exegesis. Normally, he derived a certain self-satisfaction from devoting himself to the construction of a cosmogony, something few individuals were capable of doing—it was more the kind of thing civilizations, for example, did. But he wasn’t interested now. Nor was God. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, he murmured, without awakening any responsive echo from within his mortal soul.
He thought about Donna. Sad as it was, he was relieved to think about her, the way an insomniac is relieved when he finally finds a comfortable position in bed or realizes he has stumbled onto a train of thought that is pulling him into the drift of sleep. He wondered whether she had become a heroin addict, or whether she was dead, or married, whether she was living in Oregon or Idaho. Maybe she had been in a car crash and was now paralyzed. For no apparent reason, this idea struck him as plausible.
He also thought about Kleo, trying to imagine what their life would have been like had he stayed with her. What books would he have written, what would their children have looked like? He had had a wife who loved him and he left her. A man does not receive such a gift twice in his life. What would she say if she saw him now, sitting in a wheelchair in a hospital, separated from his wife and his son, with a car he couldn’t rely on even to kill himself and a totally fried brain? Probably she would weep.
He wept.
He watched television. An ad for The Tonight Show showed Sammy Davis Jr.—Johnny Carson’s guest that evening—and Phil wondered what it would be like to have a glass eye. But first came the eleven o’clock news, offering brief, fuzzy images of Nixon on the grounds of his estate in San Clemente. The former president had nearly died from an attack of phlebitis, and now he, too, was being pushed around in a wheelchair. The camera was so far away that Nixon’s face was just a smudge, his body a shriveled silhouette under a plaid throw. Again, Phil wept, both for himself and for his old enemy. The war was over and they had reached the same point in their lives. They were both defeated.
The next day, he submitted to various routine examinations. He tried to appear as normal as possible, but he could tell he was making a bad impression. And no one there even knew this wasn’t the first time he had tried to kill himself: it was a good thing, he thought, that he had made his earlier suicide attempt in Canada.
He was told he would be kept under observation for three weeks—though it was made clear that it might also be three months. He thought about asking to be read his rights, then changed his mind. When you’re nuts, you learn to keep your mouth shut.
* * *
Not much happened in the mental ward. Unlike in fiction, the patients didn’t cow the staff, and the staff didn’t torture the patients. Basically, the patients read, watched television, sat around, dozed, played cards. They talked a little, but in the way that people talk when they’re waiting for a bus at a Greyhound terminal. Three times a day they ate meals served in plastic dishes on plastic trays, and three times a day they took their medication. Everyone got Thorazine, plus something else that the nurses refused to identify; they just stood by watching to make sure the pills were swallowed. Sometimes they made mistakes and brought the same tray of medications around twice. Even if you told them that you’d already taken your pills, the nurses insisted that you take them again. None of the patients Phil talked to, not even the most paranoid, believed that the nurses were double dosing on purpose, to make them more manageable. The nurses were stupid, the more cantankerous ones said; they were overworked, suggested the more generous ones. Even he no longer felt the desire to spin theories. He felt himself dying. His physical, mental, and spiritual life were draining from him like pus from an abscess. Soon he would be nothing more than an empty sac.
One day he found himself in a small room, waiting for an intern who was going to perform some sort of evaluation. Another patient was waiting there too, a Mexican girl, a Jehovah’s Witness who proceeded to embark on a long description of God’s Kingdom, where all the animals would lie together, the lion with the lamb. Phil was not even tempted to tell her that he knew a thing or two about the Kingdom of God and it had nothing to do with her picture-postcard vision of paradise. Survivors of concentration camps who hear someone who has never been in one holding forth on the subject can’t bring themselves to set the record straight either. They shake their heads and keep quiet.
He must have seen God too soon or too late. Either way, the meeting had not been a success from the point of view of his survival. Encountering the living God, if it was really Him he had met, had not given him the strength he needed to carry on the struggles of daily life, to hold on to his wife and child, to face with courage the trials that every man must face.
And was it really Him? Phil was no longer asking the question in the strictly academic terms in which he had posed it in the Exegesis, where all he had to do was prevent his adversary from proving the contrary. And what good had that done? He knew he had encountered something but now he discovered the encounter had done him absolutely no good. But what in life had ever done him any good?
* * *
Stacks of old newspapers lay on Formica tables. He read them methodically and distractedly. One day, he came across a short article, one of those human interest stories that are so devastating that there is no reason to develop them much beyond the bare facts. It was about a three-year-old boy whose parents had taken him to the hospital for a routine operation. He was supposed to be released the following day. The anesthesiologist had made a mistake, however, and, even after weeks of desperate efforts to correct the damage, the little boy remained deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed. Irreversibly.
As Phil read, he felt a sob rise in his throat, filling it but unable to come out. He spent the entire afternoon frozen in shock, staring blankly into space. Never had anything hurt so much. He could think of nothing else except the moment of the little boy’s awakening, when he regained consciousness in the dark. At first he would be anxious, frightened the way one is frightened when one knows the fear is going to end. Wherever he was, his parents couldn’t be far away. They would turn on the light and talk to him. But no one, nothing came to him. Not a sound. He tried to move but he wasn’t able to. He tried to cry out but he couldn’t hear his own screams. Maybe he felt it when someone touched him, when someone opened his mouth to feed him. Maybe they fed him intravenously. The article didn’t say.
His parents and the hospital staff stood around him, dissolved in horror, but the boy didn’t know this. They had no way to communicate with him. The electroencephalogram indicated that he was conscious, that there was something behind the waxy, contracted face, behind the pupils that no longer saw, and none of them could know that this someone, this little boy entombed within his own body, was silently howling with terror. No one could explain to him what had happened, and who would have had the heart to do so anyway? When and how would he understand what had happened to him? And that it would not end, that it would always be this way?
* * *
That night, as Phil lay awake in bed, unable to sleep, a sad and unshakable certainty invaded him.
He had indeed met something, had sensed its presence all its life, but it was neither God nor the devil. It was Jane. He had never had any other partner, any other adversary than this other half, this dead part of himself. Everything in his life had happened in a closed circuit. His life and all the weird stories that he had thought up were but a long dialogue between Phil and Jane. All the uncertainty from which he suffered, all the uncertainty that had been the stuff of his books came down to the question of which of the two of them was the dummy and which the ventriloquist. Was the real world the one in which he believed he lived and, like a medium, conjured up Jane in all her divine or diabolical disguises, or was it this tomb, this black hole, this eternal darkness in which Jane lived and imagined her surviving brother? He was merely the lead actor in a dead person’s dream.
Or else it was not Jane who was dead, but he.
Lying at the bottom of a grave in a Colorado cemetery for the last forty-eight years, while Jane, in the world of the living, was thinking of him. Once again, it was either one or the other, but it hardly mattered now. The time for theories was finished.
His whole life he’d been searching for reality, and now he had found it. It was this tomb. His own.
He was in it.
He had always been there.
He was the little boy in the newspaper article.
And this time there was no doubt, no hidden truth behind this Ultimate Reality. He knew he had reached the end of the line.
He also knew that he would have to forget this knowledge. Light from the sun is better than artificial light, but artificial light is better than darkness. To say otherwise is pure bluster.
He would forget. He would believe that on this night he had merely come up with another theory, a particularly depressing one perhaps, yet understandable, given the circumstances. He would go back to his illusion, to the life he thought he had been leading; he would tinker with his Exegesis, which was the best way he knew of to hide his head in the sand. He would keep saying that he would give his life to know the truth, that nothing was more desirable than the truth, and each time he said it he would mean it. And happily for him, he would forget that it wasn’t true.
It was like the story of the three wishes he had loved so much and told so many times to Jane during their childhood.
The first wish: I want to know the truth; I want to make my way up the river of forgetfulness; I want to be shown what’s down there at the bottom of the sack.
Granted.
The second wish: I want to forget what I have seen and never think about it again; I want to forget the story of the little boy, forget about this whole business of the three wishes, forget that I have a third wish coming to me. I want to forget everything.
Granted.
* * *
You’re still entitled to a third wish but you will never know that; you’ve forgotten it forever. That’s a promise.
And now, sleep.