Valis

6

The machinery of divorce chewed Fat up into a single man, freeing him to go forth and abolish himself. He could hardly wait.

Meanwhile he had entered therapy through the Orange County Mental Health people. They had assigned him a therapist named Maurice. Maurice was not your standard therapist. During the Sixties he had run guns and dope into California, using the port of Long Beach; he had belonged to SNCC and CORE and had fought as an Israeli commando against the Syrians; Maurice stood six-foot-two inches high and his muscles bulged under his shirt, nearly popping the buttons. Like Horselover Fat he had a black, curly beard. Generally, he stood facing Fat across the room, not sitting; he yelled at Fat, punctuating his admonitions with, "And I mean it." Fat never doubted that Maurice meant what he said; it wasn't an issue.

The game plan on Maurice's part had to do with bullying Fat into enjoying life instead of saving people. Fat had no concept of enjoyment; he understood only meaning. Initially, Maurice had him draw up a written list of the ten things he most wanted.

The term "wanted," as in "wanted to do," puzzled Fat.

"What I want to do," he said, "is help Sherri. So she doesn't get sick again."

Maurice roared, "You think you ought to help her. You think it makes you a good person. Nothing will ever make you a good person. You have no value to anyone."

Feebly, Fat protested that that wasn't so.

"You're worthless," Maurice said.

"And you're full of shit," Fat said, to which Maurice grinned. Maurice had begun to get what he wanted.

"Listen to me," Maurice said, "and I mean it. Go smoke dope and ball some broad that's got big tits, not one who's dying. You know Sherri's dying; right? She's going to die and then what're you going to do? Go back to Beth? Beth tried to kill you."

"She did?" Fat said, amazed.

"Sure she did. She set you up to die. She knew you'd try to ice yourself if she took your son and split."

"Well," Fat said, partly pleased; this meant he wasn't paranoid, anyhow. Underneath he knew that Beth had engineered his suicide attempt.

"When Sherri dies," Maurice said, "you're going to die. You want to die? I can arrange it right now." He examined his big wristwatch which showed everything including the positions of the stars. "Let's see; it's two-thirty. What about six this evening?"

Fat couldn't tell if Maurice were serious. But he believed that Maurice possessed the capability, as the term goes.

"Listen," Maurice said, "and I mean this. There are easier ways to die than you've glommed onto. You're doing it the hard way. What you've set up is, Sherri dies and then you have another pretext to die. You don't need a pretext -- your wife and son leaving you, Sherri croaking. That'll be the big pay-off, when Sherri croaks. In your grief and love for her -- "

"But who says Sherri is going to die?" Fat interrupted. He believed that through his magical powers he could save her; this in fact underlay all his strategy.

Maurice ignored the question. "Why do you want to die?" he said, instead.

"I don't," Fat said, who honestly believed that he didn't.

"If Sherri didn't have cancer would you want to shack up with her?" Maurice waited and got no answer, mainly because Fat had to admit to himself that, no, he wouldn't. "Why do you want to die?" Maurice repeated.

"Well," Fat said, at a loss.

"Are you a bad person?"

"No," Fat said.

"Is someone telling you to die? A voice? Someone flashing you 'die' messages?"

"No."

"Did your mother want you to die?"

"Well, ever since Gloria -- "

"Fuck Gloria. Who's Gloria? You never even slept with her. You didn't even know her. You were already preparing to die. Don't give me that shit." Maurice, as usual, had begun to yell. "If you want to help people, go up to L.A. and give them a hand at the Catholic Workers' Soup Kitchen, or turn as much of your money over to CARE as you possibly can. Let professionals help people. You're lying to yourself; you're lying that Gloria meant something to you, that what's-her-name -- Sherri -- isn't going to die -- of course she's going to die! That's why you're shacking up with her, so you can be there when she dies. She wants to pull you down with her and you want her to; it's a collusion between the two of you. Everybody who comes in this door wants to die. That's what mental illness is all about. You didn't know that? I'm telling you. I'd like to hold your head under water until you fought to live. If you didn't fight, then fuck it. I wish they'd let me do it. Your friend who has cancer -- she got it on purpose. Cancer represents a deliberate failure of the immune system of the body; the person turns it off. It's because of loss, the loss of a loved one. See how death spreads out? Everyone has cancer cells floating around in their bodies, but their immune system takes care of it."

"She did have a friend who died," Fat admitted. "He had a grand mal seizure. And her mother died of cancer."

"So Sherri felt guilty because her friend died and her mother died. You feel guilty because Gloria died. Take responsibility for your own life for a change. It's your job to protect yourself."

Fat said, "It's my job to help Sherri."

"Let's see your list. You better have that list."

Handing over his list of the ten things he most wanted to do, Fat asked himself silently if Maurice had all his marbles. Surely Sherri didn't want to die; she had put up a stubborn and brave fight; she had endured not only the cancer but the chemotherapy.

"You want to walk on the beach at Santa Barbara," Maurice said, examining the list. "That's number one."

"Anything wrong with that?" Fat said, defensively.

"No. Well? Why don't you do it?"

"Look at number two," Fat said. "I have to have a pretty girl with me."

Maurice said, "Take Sherri."

"She -- " He hesitated. He had, as a matter of fact, asked Sherri to go to the beach with him, up to Santa Barbara to spend a weekend at one of the luxurious beach hotels. She had answered that her church work kept her too busy.

"She won't go," Maurice funished for him. "She's too busy. Doing what?"

"Church."

They looked at each other.

"Her life won't differ much when her cancer returns," Maurice said finally. "Does she talk about her cancer?"

"Yes."

"To clerks in stores? Everyone she meets?"

"Yes."

"Okay, her life will differ; shell get more sympathy. She'll be better off."

With difficulty, Fat said, "One time she told me -- " He could barely say it. "That getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to her. Because then -- "

"The Federal Government funded her."

"Yes." He nodded.

"So she'll never have to work again. I presume she's still drawing SSI even though she's in remission."

"Yeah," Fat said glumly.

"They're going to catch up with her. They'll check with her doctor. Then she'll have to get a job."

Fat said, with bitterness, "She'll never get a job."

"You hate this girl," Maurice said. "And worse, you don't respect her. She's a girl bum. She's a rip-off artist. She's ripping you off, emotionally and financially. You're supporting her, right? And she also gets the SSI. She's got a racket, the cancer racket. And you're the mark." Maurice regarded him sternly. "Do you believe in God?" he asked suddenly.

You can infer from this question that Fat had cooled his Godtalk during his therapeutic sessions with Maurice. He did not intend to wind up in North Ward again.

"In a sense," Fat said. But he couldn't let it lie there; he had to amplify. "I have my own concept of God," he said. "Based on my own -- " He hesitated, envisioning the trap built from his words; the trap bristled with barbed wire. "Thoughts," he finished.

"Is this a sensitive topic with you?" Maurice said.

Fat could not see what was coming, if anything. For example, he did not have access to his North Ward files and he did not know if Maurice had read them -- or what they contained.

"No," he said.

"Do you believe man is created in God's image?" Maurice said.

"Yes," Fat said.

Maurice, raising his voice, shouted, "Then isn't it an offense against God to ice yourself? Did you ever think of that?"

"I thought of that," Fat said. "I thought of that a lot."

"Well? And what did you decide? Let me tell you what it says in Genesis, in case you've forgotten. ' Then God said, "Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all --" '"

"Okay," Fat broke in, "but that's the creator deity, not the true God."

"What?" Maurice said.

Fat said, "That's Yaldabaoth. Sometimes called Samael, the blind god. He's deranged."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Maurice said.

"Yaldaboath is a monster spawned by Sophia who fell from the Pleroma," Fat said. "He imagines he's the only god but he's wrong. There's something the matter with him; he can't see. He creates our world but because he's blind he botches the job. The real God sees down from far above and in his pity sets to work to save us. Fragments of light from the Pleroma are -- "

Staring at him, Maurice said, "Who made up this stuff? You?"

"Basically," Fat said, "my doctrine is Valentinian, second century c.e."

"What's 'c.e.'?"

"Common Era. The designation replaces a.d. Valentinus's Gnosticism is the more subtle branch as opposed to the Iranian, which of course was strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism dualism. Valentinus perceived the ontological salvific value of the gnosis, since it reversed the original primal condition of ignorance, which represents the state of the fall, the impairment of the Godhead which resulted in the botched creation of the phenomenal or material world. The true God, who is totally transcendent, did not create the world. However, seeing what Yaldaboath had done -- "

"Who's this 'Yaldaboath? Yahweh created the world! It says so in the Bible!"

Fat said, "The creator deity imagined that he was the only god; that's why he was jealous and said, 'You shall have no other gods before me,' to which -- "

Maurice shouted, "Haven't you read the Bible?"

After a pause, Fat tried another turn. He was dealing with a religious idiot. "Look," he said, as reasonably as possible. "A number of opinions exist as to the creation of the world. For instance, if you regard the world as artifact -- which it may not be; it may be an organism, which is how the ancient Greeks regarded it -- you still can't reason back to a creator; for instance, there may have been a number of creators at several times. The Buddhist idealists point this out. But even if -- "

"You've never read the Bible," Maurice said with incredulity. "You know what I want you to do? And I mean this. I want you to go home and study the Bible. I want you to read Genesis over twice; you hear me? Two times. Carefully. And I want you to write an outline of the main ideas and events in it, in descending order of importance. And when you show up here next week I want to see that list." He obviously was genuinely angry.

Bringing up the topic of God had been a poor idea, but of course Maurice hadn't known that in advance. All he intended to do was appeal to Fat's ethics. Being Jewish, Maurice assumed that religion and ethics couldn't be separated, since they are combined in the Hebrew monotheism. Ethics devolve directly from Yahweh to Moses; everybody knows that. Everybody but Horselover Fat, whose problem, at that moment, was that he knew too much.

Breathing heavily, Maurice began going through his appointment book. He hadn't iced Syrian assassins by regarding the cosmos as a sentient entelechy with psyche and soma, a macrocosmic mirror to man the microcosm.

"Let me just say one thing," Fat said.

Irritably, Maurice nodded.

"The creator deity," Fat said, "may be insane and therefore the universe is insane. What we experience as chaos is actually irrationality. There is a difference." He was silent, then.

"The universe is what you make of it," Maurice said. "It's what you do with it that counts. It's your responsibility to do something life-promoting with it, not life-destructive. "

"That's the existential position," Fat said. "Based on the concept that we are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust says, 'Im Anfang war das Wort.' He's quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; 'In the beginning was the Word.' Faust says, 'Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat.' 'In the beginning was the deed.' From this, all existentialism comes."

Maurice stared at him as if he were a bug.

Driving back to the modern two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in downtown Santa Ana, a full-security apartment with deadbolt lock in a building with electric gate, underground parking, closed-circuit TV scanning of the main entrance, where he lived with Sherri, Fat realized that he had fallen from the status of authority back to the humble status of crank. Maurice, in attempting to help him, had accidentally erased Fat's bastion of security.

However, on the good side, he now lived in this fortress-like, or jail-like, full-security new building, set dead in the center of the Mexican barrio. You needed a magnetic computer card to get the gate to the underground garage to open. This shored up Fat's marginal morale. Since their apartment was up on the top floor he could literally look down on Santa Ana and all the poorer people who got ripped off by drunks and junkies every hour of the night. In addition, of much more importance, he had Sherri with him. She cooked wonderful meals, although he had to do the dishes and the shopping. Sherri did neither. She sewed and ironed a lot, drove off on errands, talked on the telephone to her old girlfriends from high school and kept Fat informed about church matters.

I can't give the name of Sherri's church because it really exists (well, so, too, does Santa Ana), so I will call it what Sherri called it: Jesus' sweatshop. Half the day she manned the phones and the front desk; she had charge of the help programs, which meant that she disbursed food, money for shelter, advice on how to deal with Welfare and weeded the junkies out from the real people.

Sherri detested junkies, and for good reason. They continually showed up with a new scam every day. What annoyed her the most was not so much their ripping off the church to score smack, but their boasting about it later. However, since junkies have no loyalty to one another, junkies generally showed up to tell her which other junkies were doing the ripping off and the boasting. Sherri put their names down on her shit list. Customarily, she arrived home from the church, raving like a madwoman about conditions there, most especially what the creeps and junkies had said and done that day, and how Larry, the priest, did nothing about it.

After a week of living together, Fat knew a great deal more about Sherri than he had known from seeing her socially over the three years of their friendship. Sherri resented every creature on earth, in order of proximity to her; that is, the more she had to do with someone or something the more she resented him, or her or it. The great erotic love in her life took the form of her priest, Larry. During the bad days when she was literally dying from the cancer, Sherri had told Larry that her great desire was to sleep with him, to which Larry had said (this fascinated Fat, who did not regard it as an appropriate answer) that he, Larry, never mixed his social life with his business life (Larry was married, with three children and a grandchild). Sherri still loved him and still wanted to go to bed with him, but she sensed defeat.

On the positive side, one time while living at her sister's -- or conversely, dying at her sister's, to hear Sherri tell it -- she had gone into seizures and Father Larry had showed up to take her to the hospital. As he picked her up in his arms she had kissed him and he had french-kissed her. Sherri mentioned this several times to Fat. Wistfully, she longed for those days.

"I love you," she informed Fat one night, "but it's really Larry that I really love because he saved me when I was sick." Fat soon developed the opinion that religion was a sideline at Sherri's church. Answering the phone and mailing out stuff took the center ring. A number of nebulous people -- who might as well be named Larry, Moe and Curly, as far as Fat was concerned -- haunted the church, holding down salaries inevitably larger than Sherri's and requiring less work. Sherri wished death to all of them. She often spoke with relish about their misfortunes, as for instance when their cars wouldn't start or they got speeding tickets or Father Larry expressed dissatisfaction toward them.

"Eddy's going to get the royal boot," Sherri would say, upon coming home. "The little fucker."

One particular indigent chronically provoked annoyance in Sherri, a man named Jack Barbina who, Sherri said, rummaged through garbage cans to find little gifts for her. Jack Barbina showed up when Sherri was alone in the church office, handed her a soiled box of dates and a perplexing note stressing his desire to court her. Sherri pegged him as a maniac the first day she saw him; she lived in fear that he would murder her.

"I'm going to call you the next time he comes in," she told Fat. 'I'm not going to be there alone with him. There isn't enough money in the Bishop's Discretionary Fund to pay me for putting up with Jack Barbina, especially on what they do pay me, which is about half what Eddy makes, the little fairy." To Sherri, the world was divided up among slackers, maniacs, junkies, homosexuals and backstabbing friends. She also had little use for Mexicans and blacks. Fat used to wonder at her total lack of Christian charity, in the emotional sense. How could -- why would -- Sherri want to work in a church and fix her sights on religious orders when she resented, feared and detested every living human being, and, most of all, complained about her lot in life?

Sherri even resented her own sister, who had sheltered, fed and cared for her all the time she was sick. The reason: Mae drove a Mercedes-Benz and had a rich husband. But most of all Sherri resented the career of her best friend Eleanor, who had become a nun.

"Here I am throwing up in Santa Ana," Sherri frequently said, "and Eleanor's walking around in a habit in Las Vegas."

"You're not throwing up now," Fat pointed out. "You're in remission."

"But she doesn't know that. What kind of place is Las Vegas for a religious order? She's probably peddling her ass in -- "

"You're talking about a nun," Fat said, who had met Eleanor; he had liked her.

"I'd be a nun by now if I hadn't gotten sick," Sherri said.

To escape from Sherri's nattering drivel, Fat shut himself up in the bedroom he used as a study and began working once more on his great exegesis. He had done almost 300,000 words, mostly holographically, but from the inferior bulk he had begun to extract what he termed his Tractate: Cryptica Scriptura (see Appendix p. 215), which simply means "hidden discourse." Fat found the Latin more impressive as a tide.

At this point in his Meisterwerk he had begun patiently to fabricate his cosmogony, which is the technical term for, "How the cosmos came into existence." Few individuals compose cosmogonies; usually entire cultures, civilizations, people or tribes are required: a cosmogony is a group production, evolving down through the ages. Fat well knew this, and prided himself on having invented his own. He called it:

TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY

In his journal or exegesis it came as entry #47 and was by far the longest single entry.

The One was and was-not, combined, and desired to separate the was-not from the was. So it generated a diploid sac which contained, like an eggshell, a pair of twins, each an androgyny, spinning in opposite directions (the Yin and Yang of Taoism, with the One as the Tao). The plan of the One was that both twins would emerge into being (was-ness) simultaneously; however, motivated by a desire to be (which the One had implanted in both twins), the counterclockwise twin broke through the sac and separated prematurely; i.e. before full term. This was the dark or Yin twin. Therefore it was defective. At full term the wiser twin emerged. Each twin formed a unitary entelechy, a single living organism made of psyche and soma, still rotating in opposite directions to each other. The full term twin, called Form I by Parmenides, advanced correctly through its growth stages, but the prematurely born twin, called Form II, languished.

The next step in the One's plan was that the Two would become the Many, through their dialectic interaction. From them as hyperuniverses they projected a hologram-like interface, which is the pluriform universe we creatures inhabit. The two sources were to intermingle equally in maintaining our universe, but Form II continued to languish toward illness, madness and disorder. These aspects she projected into our universe.

It was the One's purpose for our hologramatic universe to serve as a teaching instrument by which a variety of new lives advanced until ultimately they would be isomorphic with the One. However, the decaying condition of hyperuniverse II introduced malfactors which damaged our hologramatic universe. This is the origin of entropy, undeserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of the life forms within the hologramatic universe, Also, the teaching function was grossly impaired, since only the signal from the hyperuniverse I was information-rich; that from II had become noise.

The psyche of hyperuniverse I sent a micro-form of itself into hyperuniverse II to attempt to heal it. The micro-form was apparent in our hologramatic universe as Jesus Christ. However, hyperuniverse II, being deranged, at once tormented, humiliated, rejected and finally killed the micro-form of the healing psyche of her healthy twin. After that, hyperuniverse II continued to decay into blind, mechanical, purposeless causal processes. It then became the task of Christ (more properly the Holy Spirit) to either rescue the life forms in the hologramatic universe, or abolish all influences on it emanating from II. Approaching its task with caution, it prepared to kill the deranged twin, since she cannot be healed; i.e. she will not allow herself to be healed because she does not understand that she is sick. This illness and madness pervades us and makes us idiots living in private, unreal worlds. The original plan of the One can only be realized now by the division of hyperuniverse I into two healthy hyperuniverses, which will transform the hologramatic universe into the successful teaching machine it was designed to be. We will experience this as the "Kingdom of God."

Within time, hyperuniverse II remains alive: "The Empire never ended." But in eternity, where the hyperuniverses exist, she has been killed -- of necessity -- by the healthy twin of h yperuniverse I, who is our champion. The One grieves for this death, since the One loved both twins; therefore the information of the Mind consists of a tragic tale of the death of a woman, the undertones of which generate anguish into all the creatures of the hologramatic universe without their knowing why. This grief will depart when the healthy twin undergoes mitosis and the "Kingdom of God" arrives. The machinery for this transformation -- the procession within time from the Age of Iron to the Age of Gold -- is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.

Not long thereafter, Sherri got fed up with Fat working night and day on his exegesis; also she got mad because he asked her to contribute some of her SSI money to pay the rent, since because of a court judgment he had to pay out a lot of spousal and child support to Beth and Christopher. Having found another apartment for which the Santa Ana housing authority would pick up the tab, Sherri wound up living by herself rent-free, without the obligation to fix Fat's dinner; also she could go out with other men, something Fat had objected to while he and Sherri were living together. To this possessiveness, Sherri had said hotly one night, when she came home from walking hand-in-hand with a male friend to find Fat furious,

"I don't have to put up with this crap."

Fat promised not to object to Sherri going out with other men any more, nor would he continue to ask her to contribute toward the rent and food costs, even though at the moment he had only nine dollars in his bank account. This did no good; Sherri was pissed.

"I'm moving out," she informed him.

After she moved out, Fat had to raise funds to purchase all manner of furniture, dishes, TV set, flatware, towels -- everything, because he had brought little or nothing with him from his marriage; he had expected to depend on Sherri's chattel. Needless to say, he found life very lonely without her; living by himself in the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment which they had shared depressed the hell out of him. His friends worried about him and tried to cheer him up. In February Beth had left him and now in early September Sherri had left him. He was again dying by inches. All he did was sit at his typewriter or with notepad and pen, working on his exegesis; nothing else remained in his life. Beth had moved up to Sacramento, seven hundred miles away, so he did not get to see Christopher. He thought about suicide, but not very much, he knew that Maurice would not approve of such thoughts. Maurice would require of him another list.

What really bothered Fat was the intuition that Sherri would soon lose her remission. From going to class at Santa Ana College and working at the church she became rundown and tired; every time he saw her, which was as often as possible, he noticed how tired and thin she looked. In November she complained of the flu; she had pains in her chest and coughed continuously.

"This fucking flu," Sherri said.

Finally he got her to go to her doctor for an X-ray and blood tests. He knew she had lost her remission by then; she could barely drag herself around.

The day she found out that she had cancer again, Fat was with her; since her appointment with the doctor was at eight in the morning, Fat stayed up the night before, just sitting. He drove her to the doctor, along with Edna, a lifelong friend of Sherri's; he and Edna sat together in the waiting room while Sherri conferred with Dr. Applebaum.

"It's just the flu," Edna said.

Fat said nothing. He knew what it was. Three days before, he and Sherri had walked to the grocery store; she could hardly put one foot before the other. No doubt existed in Fat's mind; as he sat with Edna in the crowded waiting room terror filled him and he wanted to cry. Incredibly, today was his birthday.

When Sherri emerged from Dr. Applebaum's office, she had a Kleenex pressed to her eyes; Fat and Edna ran over to her; he caught Sherri as she fell saying, "It's back, the cancer's back." She had it in the lymph nodes in her neck and she had a malignant tumor in her right lung which was suffocating her. Chemotherapy and radiation would be started in twenty-four hours.

Edna said, stricken, "I was sure it was just flu. I wanted her to go up to Melodyland and testify that Jesus had cured her."

To that remark, Fat said nothing.

The argument can be made that at this point Fat no longer had any moral obligation to Sherri. For the most meager reason she had moved out on him, leaving him alone, grieving and desperate, with nothing to do but scribble away at his exegesis. Fat's friends had all pointed this out. Even Edna pointed this out, when Sherri wasn't present in the same room. But Fat still loved her. He now asked her to move back in with him so that he could take care of her, inasmuch as she had become too weak to fix herself meals, and once she began the chemotherapy she would become a lot sicker.

"No thanks," Sherri said, tonelessly.

Fat walked down to her church one day and talked with Father Larry; he begged Larry to put pressure on the State of California Medicare people to provide someone to come in and fix meals for Sherri and to help clean up her apartment, since she would not let him, Fat, do it. Father Larry said he would, but nothing came of it. Again Fat went over to talk to the priest about what could be done to help Sherri, and while he was talking, Fat suddenly began to cry.

To this, Father Larry said enigmatically, "I've cried all the tears I am going to cry for that girl."

Fat could not tell ifthat meant that Larry had burned out his circuits from grief or that he had calculatedly, as a self-protective device, curtailed his grief. Fat does not know to this day. His own grief had reached critical mass. Now Sherri had been hospitalized; Fat visited her and saw lying in the bed a small sad shape, half the size he was accustomed to, a shape coughing in pain, with wretched hopelessness in its eyes. Fat could not drive home after that, so Kevin drove him home. Kevin, who usually maintained his stance of cynicism, could not speak from grief; the two of them drove along and then Kevin slapped him on the shoulder, which is the only avenue open to men to show love for each other.

"What am I going to do?" Fat said, meaning, What am I going to do when she dies?

He really loved Sherri, despite her treatment of him -- if indeed, as his friends maintained, she had treated him shabbily. He himself -- he neither knew nor cared about that. All he knew was that she lay in the hospital bed with metastasized tumors throughout her. Every day he visited her in the hospital, along with everyone else who knew her.

At night he did the only act left open to him: work on his exegesis. He had reached an important entry.

Entry 48. ON OUR NATURE. It is proper to say: we appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system which, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experiential information, and each of us possesses somewhat different deposits from all the other life forms, there is a malfunction -- a failure -- of memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosis -- more properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia) -- although it has individual significance for each of us -- a quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, world -- and self-experience, including immortality -- it has greater and further importance for the system as a whole, inasmuch as these memories are data needed by it and valuable to it, to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit via linear and orthogonal time changes, as well as continual signaling to us to stimulate blocked memory banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there.

The external information or gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting instructions, with the core content actually intrinsic to us -- that is, already there (first observed by Plato; viz: that learning is a form of remembering).

The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself, the total entity.

The Godhead is impaired; some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.

Fat reworked journal entry #29 and added it to his ON OUR NATURE entry:

#29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."

By now Fat's mind was going totally. All he did was work on his exegesis or his tractate or just listen to his stereo or visit Sherri in the hospital. He began to install entries in the tractate without logical order or reason.

#30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

#27. If the centuries of spurious time are excised, the true date is not 1978 c.e. but 103 c.e. Therefore the New Testament says that the Kingdom of the Spirit will come before "some now living die." We are living, therefore, in apostolic times.

#20. The Hermetic alchemists knew of the secret race of three-eyed invaders but despite their efforts could not contact them. Therefore their efforts to support Frederick V, Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, failed. "The Empire never ended."

#21. The Rose Cross Brotherhood wrote, "Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus," which is to say, "From God we are born, in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again." This signifies that they had rediscovered the lost formula for immortality which the Empire had destroyed. "The Empire never ended."

#10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

#12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,"to which some of those present correctly said, "The man is calling on Elijah." Elijah had left him and he died alone.

At this moment as he made this entry, Horselover Fat was dying alone. Elijah, or whatever divine presence it was that had fired tons of information into his skull in 1974, had indeed left him. The dreadful question that Fat asked himself over and over again did not get put down in his journal or tractate; the question could be put this way:

If the divine presence knew about Christopher's birth defect and did something to correct it, why doesn't it do something about Sherri's cancer? How could it let her lie there dying?

Fat could not figure this out. The girl had gone an entire year wrongly diagnosed; why hadn't Zebra fired that information to Fat or to Sherri's doctor or to Sherri -- to someone?

Fired it in time to save her!

One day when Fat visited Sherri in the hospital, a grinning fool stood there by her bed, a simp who Fat had met; this thing used to shamble in while Fat and Sherri lived together and would put his arms around Sherri, kiss her and tell her he loved her -- never mind Fat. This childhood friend of Sherri's, when Fat entered the hospital room, was saying to Sherri,

"What'll we do when I'm king of the world and you're queen of the world?"

To which Sherri, in agony, murmured, "I just want to get rid of these lumps in my throat."

Fat had never come so close to coldcocking anybody into tomorrow as at that moment. Kevin, who had accompanied him, had to physically hold Fat back.

On the drive back to Fat's lonely apartment, where he and Sherri had lived together for such a short time, Fat said to Kevin, "I'm going crazy. I can't take it."

"That's a normal reaction," Kevin said, showing nothing of his cynical pose, these days.

"Tell me," Fat said, "why God doesn't help her." He kept Kevin up on the progress of his exegesis; his encounter with God in 1974 was known to Kevin, so Fat could talk openly.

Kevin said, "It's the mysterious ways of the Great Punta."

"What the fuck is that?" Fat said.

"I don't believe in God," Kevin said. "I believe in the Great Punta. And the ways of the Great Punta are mysterious. No one knows why he does what he does, or doesn't do."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No," Kevin said.

"Where did the Great Punta come from?"

"Only the Great Punta knows."

"Is he benign?"

"Some say he is; some say he isn't."

"He could help Sherri if he wanted to."

Kevin said, "Only the Great Punta knows that."

They started laughing.

Obsessed with death, and going crazy from grief and worry about Sherri, Fat wrote entry #15 in his tractate.

#15. The Sibyl of Cumae protected the Roman Republic and gave timely warnings. In the first century c.e. she foresaw the murders of the two Kennedy brothers, Dr. King and Bishop Pike. She saw the two common denominators in the four murdered men: first, they stood in defense of the liberties of the Republic; and second, each man was a religious leader. For this they were killed. The Republic had once again become an empire with a caesar. 'The Empire never ended."

#16. The Sibyl said in March 1974, "The conspirators have been seen and they will be brought to justice." She saw them with the third or ajna eye, the Eye of Shiva which gives inward discernment, but which when turned outward blasts with desiccating heat. In August 1974 the justice promised by the Sibyl came to pass.

Fat decided to put down on the tractate all the prophetic statements fired into his head by Zebra.

#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.

Knowing this, by direct route from the divine, made Fat a latter-day prophet. But, since he had gone crazy, he also entered absurdities into his tractate.

#50.The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.

By now Fat had totally lost touch with reality.