But am I alive? I asked myself.
Only time would tell. I felt at this moment as if a mortal blow had been delivered to me, a blade thrust deep; the pain was unbearable. But I might survive. I had survived the attack on my house; I had survived many things. Probably I would survive this. If I did, FAP was in trouble, Vivian Kaplan in particular.
I told myself that, but I didn’t really believe it. What I believed was that FAP and its master Ferris Fremont had me. And I had sprung the trap myself—that was the worst part, the part that really hurt. My own cunning had betrayed me, had delivered me to the enemy. That was hard to bear.
13
The cops never came; whatever Vivian Kaplan had been up to fizzled out, and I was able to relax. In the following days my temperature went down to normal, probably my blood pressure as well. I began to think more reasonably. However, I asked my lawyer what to do about them hiding dope in my house.
“Write a letter to Orange County Drug Abuse,” he told me. “Tell them the situation.”
“Will that—?”
“They may still bust you, but when they find the letter in their files they may be lenient.”
Anyhow, nothing happened. I began to sleep at night again. Vivian evidently had been bluffing; I was beginning to notice a lot of bluffing going on. The police seemed fond of that tactic; it had to do with getting the suspect to perform the hard work himself, as I had demonstrated my willingness to.
They eat people like me for breakfast, I said to myself. My engineering a roll in the hay with Vivian had severely crippled my faith in my own tactics. I could not regain the conviction that in the end I, and people like me, would prevail. To prevail I would have to become a lot less stupid.
I of course told Nicholas the whole thing. He of course was incredulous.
“You did what?” he said. “You went to bed with an underage FAP girl who was carrying dope in her purse? My God; if they gave you a hacksaw in a cake you’d saw your way into jail. You want me to provide the cake? Rachel will be glad to bake it. Get your own saw.”
“Vivian was working so many numbers on me at once that I got confused,” I said.
“A seventeen-year-old girl puts an intelligent grown man in jail. Even when he’s being super-cautious.”
I said, truthfully, “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Stay away from her from now on,” Nicholas said. “Entirely away. Spend your time with knotholes, if necessary. Anything but her.”
“Okay!” I said irritably. But I knew I’d see Vivian Kaplan again. She would seek me out. There would be another round with the authorities—perhaps several. Until they had netted Nicholas and me to their satisfaction. Until we were harmless.
I wondered if the alleged protection which Valis supplied Nicholas extended to me. After all, we were in it together: two major stations in the network of pop culture, as the FAPers had put it. Kingpins, so to speak, in the vox populi.
Perhaps the only entity we could turn to for help in this tyrannical situation was Valis. Valis against F.F.F. The Prince of this World—Ferris Fremont—and his foe from another realm, a foe Fremont didn’t even know existed. A product of Nicholas Brady’s mind. The prognosis was not comforting. I would have preferred something or someone more tangible. Still, it was better than nothing; it provided a certain psychological comfort. Nicholas, in the privacy of our intimate rap sessions, could envision vast operations by Valis and his transcendent forces against the cruel bondage we were in. It certainly beat watching TV, which now consisted mostly of propaganda dramas extolling the police, authority in general, war, car crashes, and the Old West, where simple virtues had prevailed. John Wayne had become the official folk hero of America.
And then there was the weekly “Conversation with the Man We Trust,” Ferris F. Fremont speaking from a firelit alcove in the White House.
It was a real problem to get the masses to watch Ferris Fremont deliver his speeches, because he spoke in such a dull way. It was like sitting through an endless lecture on some obscure aspect of economics—exactly like that, since Fremont invariably gave a rundown of figures from all departments. Evidently, behind his nondescript figure a powerful White House staff lurked, never seen, who fed him an infinitude of typed information on every topic bearing on his rule. Fremont did not appear to regard all this as dull. “Iron production,” he would stumble along, reading half the words off the cue card wrong, “is up three percent, giving rise to a justified optimism in agricultural quarters.” I always had the feeling I was back in school, and the tests we had to fill out afterward reinforced this sensation.
This did not make Ferris Fremont a figurehead, however, fronting for the staff who fed his facts to him; on the contrary, when he departed from his prepared script the real savagery in him came out. He liked to depart when matters concerning America and its honor and destiny were mentioned. East Asia was a place where American boys were demonstrating that honor, and Fremont could not let a reference to that topic pass without an extempore comment, at which times his sallow face would furrow with intensity and he would stumble out words of grim determination to all who would challenge American might. We had a plethora of American might, to hear Fremont speak of it. Half his time was spent warning unmentioned enemies of that might. I usually assumed he meant the Chinese, although he seldom saw cause to mention them by name. Being from California, Fremont kept a special place in his heart for the Chinese; to hear him speak you would have thought they had overcharged us in their laying of railroad track—a matter he could not,
