I heard nothing and felt nothing, no concussion or shock. All I saw was my windshield turn into a billion broken Coke bottle bottoms, a strange pattern like a giant spiderweb engulfing me. Fallen into the spiderweb, I remember thinking. To be eaten later. The spiderweb, but where is the spider? I thought. Gone away.
Liquid had spilled over my neck and chest. It was my own blood.
23THE din around me was terrible. Wheeled down a ramp, strapped flat; I tried to turn my head but could not. Voices, movement; a face peered down at me, a woman’s face, and I heard a woman’s voice. She was flashing a light in my eyes and telling me to do something. I could not do it. Sorry, I thought.
“Are you in a health plan?” another voice asked insistently. “Do you have Blue Cross? Can you sign this form, if I hold it for you? Here’s a pencil. You may sign it with your left hand if you wish.”
The hell with you, I thought.
I could see two California Highway Patrolmen in their brown uniforms, standing off to one side with a clipboard, looking bored. Wheelchairs, gurneys. Little young nurses in short skirts, and a crucifix on the wall.
Beside me a Highway Patrol officer bent down and said. “Don’t let your insurance company fix up your car. It’s leaking oil from the motor. The block is cracked.”
“Okay,” I managed to whisper. I felt nothing, thought nothing.
“I’m going to have to cite you, Mr. Brady,” the Highway Patrol officer said. “For following too close and driving at an unsafe speed. I have your license; we’re checking for warrants. You’re going right into surgery, so I’ll return your license to the personal property office of the hospital. It’ll be with your other things, your wallet and keys and money.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The officer departed. I lay there alone, thinking to myself. What the hell, what the hell. They should call somebody, I thought. Rachel. They ought to notify her; I should tell them. Remind them. What do they care? I thought, I wonder what hospital this is. I was driving—where? Just into Orange County. I never made it back to Placentia, back home. Well, so much for that. I’ll take his advice, I decided. Not let them fix the car. They can total it and auction it. What do I care what I get for it? What do I care about anything?
Two nurses took hold of my gurney and began to wheel it cheerfully. Bump, bump, roll. Stop for the elevator; they stood together, with smiles. I stared fixedly straight up. There was an IV bottle mounted above me. Five percent glucose, I read from the label. To keep a vein open, I decided.
Incredibly bright white lights beamed down on me. This was the operating room. They put a mask over the lower part of my face; I heard male voices, conferring. A needle stuck into my arm. It hurt. It was the first thing I had felt.
The bright white lights suddenly turned black, like dead coals.
I floated across a desert landscape which showed red and brown far below me. Far off the outline of mesas. A great void in which I moved, suspended and effortless.
Someone approached me. Far off, beyond the dry mesas. Invisible presence, shining with love. It was Valis. I recognized his being; he was familiar: the concern, the understanding, the desire to help.
We exchanged no words. I heard no voice, no sound at all except a continual gentle roaring, like wind. The sounds of the wasteland, the desert, the great open places of the world. Wind and water rushing…but they did not seem impersonal; they seemed alive, as if part of Valis. Expressions of him, as kind and warm and loving as he was; he animated the mesas.
Valis asked me, silently, if I thought he had forgotten me.
I said, What if they shoot down the satellite?
No matter. It is a pinpoint in the sky. Behind it lies only light. A sheet of light, not sky.
Did I cash in? I asked.
No response.
I’m coming here eventually, I said. I know that. I recognize this place; I have been here before.
You were born here. You have come back.
This is my homeland, I said.
I am your father, Valis said.
Where are you?
Above the stars, Valis said.
I came from above the stars?
Yes. Many times.
Then, I said, that was me? Who took over when the ad came in the mail?
That was yourself, remembering who you are.
Who am I? I said.
Everyone.
Amazed, I said, Everyone?
No response, only the pulsations of love.
What am I going to do? I asked.
You asked to be broken down, Valis answered. And healed. This is that breaking down and healing. You will be changed.
And go on? I asked.
The warmth of his love consumed me like an invisible^ cloud of light. He responded, And go on. Nothing is ever lost.
I can’t be lost? I asked.
There is nowhere for anything to go. There is only here and us. For all time.
I realized then, that Valis and I had never been separated, that he had only fallen silent from time to time. I felt tired, now; I had drifted low over the mesas and I wanted to rest. There was a lessening sense of Valis’s presence, as if he were withdrawing. Yet he still remained, like a lamp turned down, down but not off. Like a child, I has assumed that something no longer seen no longer existed. To an infant, when its parents leave the room they cease to be. But as he grows older he understands differently. They are there whether or not he can see them or touch them or hear their voices. It is an early lesson. But sometimes perhaps not completely learned.
So now I knew who Valis was; he was my father, my real father, from whose race I came repeatedly into this world, to leave again, to return again, to work toward some distant goal unseen, not as yet comprehended. The search, perhaps, was the goal. As I achieved a little motion toward it, I understood it. Overthrowing the tyranny of Ferris Fremont was a stop along the way, not a goal but a moment of decision, from which I then continued as before. Changed to some extent, but changed by my father, not by what I had done. For, I understood, Valis himself did it, through me. The virtue lay with him.
We are gloves, I realized, which our father puts on in order to achieve his objectives. What a pleasure to be that, to be of use. Part of a greater organism: its extensions into space and time, into the world of change. To influence that change—the greatest joy of all.
I can instruct you, Valis’s thoughts came, without the satellite. It is a thing to show them, a shiny toy. To make them understand. When it fired it did its task; it served to open your mind and other minds. Those minds, opened once, will never close. The contact is established and the circuit is in place. It will remain that way.
I am linked up then, I realized. For all time.
You have remembered. You know. There is now no forgetting. Be of good cheer.
Thank you, I said.
The reddish mesas, the level plain below me, faded; the sky closed and the sound of rushing wind slowly diminished.
Valis was out of my sight now, his face turned away from me, retractile in his cycle. I experienced this time no loss, as I always had before.
Son of Earth and starry heaven. The old rite, the disclosure to the ancient initiate. I had undergone the Orphic ceremonies, down in the dark caves, to emerge suddenly into the chamber of light, to see the gold tablet that reminded me of my own nature and my past: trip across space from Albemuth, the far star, migration to this world, to blend here in escape from our molelike enemy. That enemy had soon followed, and the garden we built had been polluted and made toxic with his presence, with his wastes. We sank into the silt; we became half blind; we forgot until reminded. Reminded by the rotating voice from the nearby sky, placed there long ago in case a calamity occurred, a break in the chain of continuity. Such a break did come. And, presently, the voice automatically fired. And informed us, as best as it could, of what we no longer knew.
If the Russians did photograph the ETI satellite, the invader, they would find it old and pitt
ed. I had been there thousands of years. What a surprise that would be; they, too, might remember…until the molelike adversary closed up their minds and they forgot again. Were made to forget again, as the deformed landscape, clouded over by the poisoned atmosphere, occluded their senses and thoughts and they fell again, as before.
Recurrent cycles, I realized, of coming awake for a time, then falling back into sleep. I had, like the others, been asleep, but then I had woken up; or, rather, I had been awakened out of my sleep deliberately. The voice of a friend had called to me, as it moved among the rows of new corn, new life, and I had heard and recognized it. That voice was always calling, always attempting to wake us up, we who slept. Perhaps eventually we all would awaken. To communicate once again with our parent race beyond the stars…as if we had never left.
Albemuth. Our first home. We were wanderers, exiles, all of us, whether we knew it or not. Perhaps most of us wanted to forget. Memory—to be aware of our true condition, our identity—was too painful. We would make this place our home and we would recall nothing else. It was easier that way.
The simplicity of unawareness. The easier way. Deadly in its outcome: without memory we had fallen victim to our adversary. We had forgotten him, too, and been overtaken and surprised. That was the price we paid.
We paid it now.
24WHEN I returned to consciousness I found myself in the recovery room, with a nurse taking my pulse. My chest hurt, I had difficulty breathing. An oxygen mask covered my nose. And I was terribly hungry.
“My,” the nurse said brightly. “We really ran our little car into a lot of trouble.”
“What happened to me?” I managed to say.
“Dr. Wintaub will discuss your surgery with you,” the nurse said. “After you’re taken to your room.”
“Did you notify…?”
“Your wife is on the way here.”
“What city is this?” I said.
“Downey.”
“I’m a long way from home,” I said.
Half an hour after I had been taken upstairs to a two-patient room, Dr. Wintaub entered to examine me.
“How do you feel?” he asked, taking my pulse.
“A bad headache,” I said. I could not remember having had such a headache; it was equaled only by the pain I had experienced the night Valis had informed me of Johnny’s birth defect. And my sight seemed impaired again, as well.
“You’ve been through a lot,” Dr. Wintaub pulled the covers back, inspected my bandages. “Your lung was punctured by a broken rib,” he said. “That was why we entered the chest cavity. You’re going to be here, I’m afraid, for some time. The steering wheel of your car caught you head on and did most of the damage—” His voice abruptly came to a halt.
“What is it?” I said, afraid at what he had found.
“I’ll be back in a minute, Mr. Brady.” Dr. Wintaub departed from the room; I was left to wonder about it. Presently he returned with two male technicians. “I want his bandages removed,” Wintaub said. “And the splints. I want to examine the wound.”
They began removing the bandages, with extreme gentleness. Dr. Wintaub watched critically. I felt nothing, no discomfort, no pain. The headache remained; it was like a migraine headache, with a flashing grid of extraordinarily intense pink light in my right eye, a field of blurred color slowly moving from left to right.
“There, doctor.” The technicians stepped back.
Dr. Wintaub came close; I felt his deft fingers touch my chest. “I performed this surgery,” he murmured. “About two hours ago.” He studied his wristwatch. “Two hours and ten minutes ago.”
“Could you look at my eyes?” I said. “That’s where the pain is.”
Impatiently, Dr. Wintaub flashed a light in my eyes. “Follow the light,” he murmured. “You’re tracking okay.” He returned to my chest. To the two technicians he said. “Take him down to X-ray and do a full chest series.”
“All right to move him, doctor?” one of the technicians asked.
“Just be extremely careful,” Wintaub said.
I was wheeled down to X-ray and chest plates were made, several of them, and then I was returned to my room. While waiting at X-ray I managed to sit up enough to see my own chest.
A firm pink line crossed it. The incision had healed.
No wonder Dr. Wintaub wanted immediate X-rays; he had to know if the internal damage had mended as well.
Shortly, two unfamiliar doctors entered and began to examine me; with them they brought nurses and equipment. I lay silently, staring at the ceiling. My headache had begun to abate, for which I was thankful, and my vision was clearing, except for a residual pink phosphene color. From what I had seen of my chest, plus my knowledge of the meaning of the pink phosphene light, I understood the situation. Valis had handled my case, as he had handled Johnny’s, in the most economical fashion possible: normal surgical procedure and then, under the influence of the satellite and its emissions, unnaturally rapid repair. Probably I was ready to leave the hospital.
The problem, however, lay with the doctors. They had never encountered such a thing.
“How soon do you think I’ll be out of here?” I asked Dr. Wintaub when he appeared after dinnertime; I was sitting up eating a regular meal. I felt fine, now. The doctor could see this. It did not appear to please him.
“This is a teaching hospital,” he said.
“You want the student doctors to see me,” I said.
“That is correct.”
“The chest cavity has repaired itself?”
“Completely so, as nearly as we can tell. But we’ll need to keep you under observation; it may be superficial repair.”
“Has my wife been called?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s on her way. I told her the operation was successful. Mr. Brady, have you ever had surgery before?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did they note a highly accelerated rate of repair? Of tissue recovery?”
I said nothing.
Dr. Wintaub said. “Can you account for this, Mr. Brady?”
“Hormone production,” I said.
“Not possible.”
“I’d like to be discharged,” I said. “So I can go home tonight with my wife.”
“That is out of the question, Mr. Brady. After an operation of this severity—”
“I’ll sign out AMA,” I said. “Against medical advice. Bring me the forms.”
“No way, Mr. Brady. I won’t cooperate with you. We are going to study you until we know what has taken place in your body following surgery. When you came in here, one lung was almost—”
“Bring me my clothes,” I said.
“No.” Dr. Wintaub left the room; the door shut after him.
I got out of bed and searched the closet and drawers, No clothes, except for a hospital gown. I put that on. If I had to I would leave that way. Neither Dr. Wintaub nor the hospital could hold me in view of my complete recovery.
There was no doubt of my recovery. I could feel it physically, and in my mind I was aware of it, as aware as I had been that night I comprehended Johnny’s birth defect. The only problem I had was getting home. And that was a minor one.
I left the hospital room and walked down the hall, looking into rooms with open doors, until I saw a room with no one in it. The patients were out getting exercise after finishing dinner. Entering the room I opened the clothes closet. All I could find were a pair of fuzzy carpet slippers, a woman’s bright print dress with plunging backline, and a turban made of pastel fabric. It would be better if I resembled a woman, I realized; they would be looking for a man. Fortunately, the woman whose clothes these were had an enormous build; I was able to get into all of them, and, after picking up a pair of dark glasses from a drawer, I set out into the hall again.
No one stopped me or interfered with me as I made my way down the corridor to a stairwell. Moments later I had reached the ground floor and had come out onto the parking lot. All that remained was to sit on
a bench watching the incoming cars until I saw Rachel’s Maverick.
I found a bench to one side, seated myself, and waited.
An unspecified interval later—my watch was gone, either destroyed or in the patients’ property safe—the green Maverick pulled hastily into a slot and Rachel and Johnny emerged, both distraught and disheveled.
As Rachel hurried up the walk past my bench I stood up and said. “Let’s take off.”
Halting, she stared at me in amazement.
“I wouldn’t have recognized you,” she said finally.
“They didn’t want me to leave.” I walked toward the car, motioning her to accompany me.
“Can you leave? I mean, are you well enough? The doctor said you’d undergone major surgery on your chest—”
“I’m fine,” I said. “The satellite healed me.”
“Then the satellite is what you’ve been experiencing.”
“Yep,” I said, getting into the car.
“You do seem physically okay…but you certainly look funny in those clothes.”
“You can pick up my personal effects tomorrow,” I said, slamming the car door after me. “Hi, Johnny,” I said to my son. “Recognize Daddy?”
My son stared at me sourly and with suspicion.
“The satellite could have provided you with better clothes,” Rachel said.
“I don’t think it does that,” I said. “You have to find your own. That’s what I did.”
“Maybe you should have waited until it thought of something,” Rachel said. She shot me a glance as she drove from the hospital parking lot. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
As we found our way out onto the freeway, I thought to myself, I certainly got a printout while I was under the anesthetic. Did Valis engineer my accident so he could speak to me? No, Valis engineered my recovery so he could work through me. He took advantage of a bad situation and brought something out of it: the best colloquy we have had and probably will ever have. What I know now, I realized, is boundless. The major pieces are in place. The delight of finding each other, Valis and I. Father and son, together again. After millennia. The relationship restored.
Radio Free Albemuth Page 19