If you'll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people.
Better he had kept on with the dope.
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 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 position 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 furnished 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; she'll 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 Yaldaboath. 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 the 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 t
hose 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 back-stabbing 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?
The VALIS Trilogy Page 9
