“God? You think this—you think these things are God? Smoke-
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
processors began to shut down in my brain, one by one, overwhelmed by alcohol and demons. Daisy, Daisy . . .
Then I remembered the chains. I couldn’t be wandering around like this. Had to get them chains.
I turned, unsure now which way led back to the elevators. The hallway stretched into the distance, door after door after door, the infinite regress of a mirrored mirror.
6
I woke up screaming, limbs paralyzed by restraints. This wasn’t unusual. Over the past few months, it had become routine. What was new was the intense light in my eyes, the number of people around me, and the particular quality of the pain. Someone just out of sight—a tall, blond nurse with blue eyes, I think—was scraping the skin off my hands with a carpenter’s file, or perhaps playing a butane torch over my knuckles. Another tall, blond person was working behind me. The holes in the top of my skull had already been drilled, and now she was inserting the tiny wires that would carry electricity into the folds of the angular gyrus. Other Scandinavians, dressed in brilliant white, moved in and out of the light, haloed and indistinct, murmuring in Swedish. However, when I shut my mouth and stopped screaming, a female voice said, “Thank you.” So at least one of them was bilingual.
The butane treatment went on for a long time. I waited for the electricity to travel down the wires into my gray matter and jolt me out of my body. I was looking forward to seeing what the room looked like from the ceiling: my body stretched out on a tasteful pine gurney by IKEA, the sensuous nurses bent over my empty tin can of a body, their crisp uniforms unbuttoned to expose milky white cleavage.
“Hit me!” I commanded in my best James Brown.
“Okay, that’s it,” a male voice said. In English again, unless my hyperstimulated lobes, drawing on race memory encoded in my DNA, were automatically translating. “Take him down to the drunk tank.”
That’s right, I’d been drinking. Coors Light, mostly. Coors Fucking Light! Was it even possible to get drunk on Coors Light?
Evidently.
Walls zipped past. Elevators dropped and rose. The ambulance rumbled. Time progressed in a series of jump-cuts: Now, Now, Now. Something bad had happened. Several bad things. I was almost sure of it.
I needed to remember something important. Or unforget it. What was that word again?
I looked into the upside-down face of the man pushing my gurney into the building.
“Anamnesis,” I said proudly.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
Amra and My Very Bigger Brother were waiting for me in the busy front room of the First District Police Station.
“Good morning, starshine,” Lew said.
I smiled weakly. I felt nauseous, still slightly drunk. My body felt like it had been yanked apart and snapped back together by clumsy children. My hands ached fiercely. I suspected the pain would only get worse as the alcohol wore off.
“Thanks for this,” I said. This: driving downtown on a Monday morning; putting up money for bail; existing. “Did you tell Mom?”
“What, and kill her?” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t have the energy for banter. Amra lightly touched one bandaged hand. “Does it hurt?”
“Little bit.” I’d woken up with my right hand wrapped from wrist to fingers, turning it into a club. My left hand was only partially wrapped, but blood had seeped through the bandages on my palm like a stigmata. The tips of my fingers were stained black from the fingerprinting. Or so I assumed. I couldn’t remember that.
The bandages had made it difficult to sign the I-Bond, the piece of paper releasing me on my own recognizance until my court date on April 20. My thought was that if I was still cognizant of anything by then, I’d be more than happy to show up.