Pandemonium

stack Johnny, the Piper, the Fat Boy?” I reached for my glass, my glass of brown something. “Then God is a fucking whack job.” I had to concentrate: the tips of my fingers had gone numb, as had my lips, and getting the glass to my mouth involved levels of concentration I usually reserved for winning kewpie dolls with the Claw. Drop a quarter, win a Wild Turkey.

Whose hotel room was this?

“The Eye can destroy, too,” the kid said. “Valis says that the carrier signal is also harmful radiation. Maybe some people can’t handle the information when it hits them. These deviants get overridden by the purity of the info-stream.”

“We should go,” Selena said.

“Or maybe that’s the real message getting through,” Tom said.

“Shiva’s two-sided, man—protector of the weak, but destroyer of the wicked. If you try to shut that down, you’re removing the divine essence from humanity.”

“Divine essence?” I said. “Hey, I’m Fat Boy, I’ll possess a guy and make him eat ten pounds of chocolate at one sitting! Yeah, that’s divine, that’s fucking deep, that’s like . . .” I couldn’t think what that was like. It was like something, though. “All I’m saying, we shouldn’t have to live in fear like this. I mean, Christ, ever since Eisenhower’s assassination, the Japanese have been treated like dogs, and the president still can’t appear on live television—everything’s a fucking tape delay!

And the Secret Service guys are standing by with tranqs in case he gets all Nixon on them!”

“Nixon wasn’t possessed,” somebody said. “He was just crazy.”

“All I am saying—”

“Is that we can’t live like this,” the kid said. “But we can. We do. Even the Israelis get back on the bus.”

“We should go,” Selena said again. Not just for the second time—

she’d been saying it since Valis left an hour ago, escorted by a trio of young people.

“Let me get one for the road,” Tom said. He pulled another Coors Light can from the case, then took something from his pocket—a flap of vinyl. He wrapped it around the beer, transforming it into a publicly respectable Mountain Dew can. A RePubliCan.

“You know,” I said, struck by a brilliant thought. “If you poured the beer out now, and replaced it with Mountain Dew, then you’d have a fake fake.”

“You don’t say,” Tom said.

“A Valis Special!”

Selena said, “You’re not driving anywhere, are you, Del?” I shook my head vigorously and waved good-bye.

Sometime later I looked around and realized I didn’t know the name of anyone in the room. Even the Armenian kid had vanished. I left the party and started looking for a way up to my floor. I passed a sandwich sign announcing possession movies playing in a ballroom—

Omen, Being John Malkovich, Fail-Safe, 2001: A Space Odyssey—and veered toward the doors, but then I saw the bank of elevators and corrected course. A door opened and a bunch of us pressed inside. “Eighteenth floor,” I said. A minute later the elevator hissed open like an airlock, and someone behind me tapped me between my shoulder blades. That bit of kinetic energy sent me slowly drifting down the hall.

My vision had tunneled down to the wrong end of a cheap telescope: everything was too small and too far away. I drifted down to my door.

The key card eventually appeared in my hand, a clumsy magic trick. I slid it in, slid it out, slid it in again . . . Door sex. The red light blinked at me, refusing to turn green. I grabbed the handle, stared into the bubble lens of the peephole. The thing in my head stomped and rattled. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the fucking—

I leaned back from the door, squinted at the number. This wasn’t my floor. But I’d been here earlier; I’d walked past that prehistoric-size plant . . .

Oh, right. Dr. Ram.

Dr. Fucking Ram.

The demon thrashed in my head. I was crashing. Lucite banks of