My incompetence had called these invisible friends forth. Had I been more gifted I would not now know of them. It was, in my mind, a good trade. Few people had the awareness I now possessed. Because of my limitations an entire new universe had revealed itself to me, a benign and living hyperenvironment endowed with absolute wisdom. Wow, I said to myself. You can’t beat that. I had caught a glimpse of the Big People. It was a lifetime dream fulfilled. You’d have to go back to ancient times to find a comparable revelation. Things like this didn’t happen in the modern world.
19
One week after I returned to Progressive Records, Mrs. Sadassa Silvia walked in and asked for a job. She did not want to be recorded by us, she informed us; she wanted a job such as I had: auditioning other artists. She stood before my desk, wearing pink bell-bottoms and a man’s checkered shirt, her coat over her arm, her small face pale with fatigue. It looked as if she had walked a long way.
“I don’t hire,” I told her. “That’s not my job.”
“Yes, but you have the desk nearest the door,” Mrs. Silvia said. “May I sit down?” Without waiting, she seated herself in a chair facing my desk. She had come into my office; I had left the door open. “Do you want to see my résumé?”
“I’m not personnel,” I repeated.
Mrs. Silvia gazed at me through her rather thick glasses. She had a pretty, pert face, very much as it had appeared in the two dreams. I was amazed at her small size; she seemed unusually thin, and I had the impression that she was not physically strong, that in fact she was not well. “Well, can I just sit here a second and get my breath?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, rising to my feet. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water?”
Mrs. Silvia said, “Do you have a cup of coffee?”
I fixed her coffee; she sat there gazing inertly ahead, slumped a little in the chair. She was well dressed, and in good taste, in a very modern way, a Southern California style. She had a little white hat on, down deep in her Afro-natural black hair.
“Thank you.” She accepted the coffee from me and I noticed the beauty of her hands; she had long fingers and fastidiously manicured nails, lacquered but unpainted. This is a very classy girl, I said to myself. I judged her age as early twenties. When she spoke, her voice was cheerful and expressive, but her face remained impassive, without warmth. As if weighed down, I thought. As if she has had a good deal of trouble in her life.
“You want a job as what?” I said.
“I take shorthand and type and I have two years of college as a journalism major. I can copyedit your blurb copy for you; I worked on the school publications at Santa Ana College.” She had the most perfect, lovely teeth I had ever seen, and rather sensuous lips—in contrast to the severity of her glasses. It was as if the lower half of her face had rebelled against an asceticism imposed on her by childhood training; I got the impression of an ample physical nature, checked by deliberate moral restraint. This girl, I decided, calculates everything she does. Calculates its worthiness before she does it. This is a highly controlled person, not given to spontaneity.
And, I decided, very bright.
“What kind of guitar do you own?” I asked.
“A Gibson. But I don’t play professionally.”
“Do you write songs?”
“Only poetry.”
I quoted, “ ‘You have to put your slippers on / To walk toward the dawn.’ ”
She laughed, a rich, throaty laugh. “Oh, yes. ‘Ode to Empedocles.’ ”
“What?” I said uncertainly.
“You must have read it in my high school yearbook.”
“How could I read it in your high school yearbook?”
Mrs. Silvia said, “When did you read it?”
“I forget,” I said.
“A friend of mine wrote it under my picture. She meant I’m too idealistic, I guess. That I don’t have my feet on the ground, but go charging off in all directions. . . . I get into different causes. She was very critical of me.”
“You better go and see personnel,” I told her.
Some aspects of the dream had been correct. In other regards it was completely off. As precognition, which is what Phil would have called it, faulty reception or faulty transduction and interpretation by my dreaming mind had badly disfigured the information. I could hardly record someone who took dictation. We wouldn’t sell much of that. I could hardly act out the instructions of the dream, whether it came from Valis or not.
Still, it was amazing that this much was accurate. The dream had the name right, and she did look, in real life, as she had appeared in the snapshot and on the album cover. If nothing more, it proved the reality of dream precognition; nothing more, in all likelihood, in that it appeared to end here. If she got any kind of job with us it would be a miracle; as far as I knew we were overstaffed already.
Setting down her coffee cup, Mrs. Silvia rose and gave me a brief, spirited smile. “Maybe I’ll be seeing you again.” She departed from my office, walking in slow, almost unsteady steps; I noticed how thin her legs seemed, but it was hard to judge with the bell-bottoms.
After I shut my office door I discovered that she had left her résumé and her keys. Born in Orange County in the town of Yorba Linda, in 1951. . . . I couldn’t help glancing over the résumé as I carried it out of my office and down the hall after her. Maiden name: Sadassa Aramchek.
I halted and stood holding the résumé. Father: Serge Aramchek. Mother: Galina Aramchek. Was this why the AI
