Like cancer cells, the original constituents of the universe proliferated without direction, a total panoply of newness. Allowed to escape, they went wherever casual chains drove them. The architect who imposed form and order and deliberate shape was, in the cancer process, somehow missing. I had learned a great deal from my James-James dream; I could see that blind creation, not subjected to pattern, could destroy; it could be a steamroller that crushed the small and helpless in its eagerness to grow. More accurately, it was like one immense living organism which spread out into all the space available to it, without regard for the consequences; it was only impelled by the drive to expand and increase. What became of it largely depended on the wise receiver, who pruned and trimmed it as each step of the growth took place.
Seated on the couch by myself I passed from a contemplation of this into a trance-like state, bordering on sleep but not quite sleep; I was still conscious enough to be aware of myself and, to a certain extent, to think. I found myself confronting a modern-looking teletype attached to wires that led into ultrasophisticated electronic assemblies far superior to anything we humans actually have.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF.
I watched the words print themselves out, and as they were printed I heard the same chug-chug made by James-James’s radioactive cosmic machine of creation.
I said. “I am Nicholas Brady of Placentia, California.”
After a measurable pause the teletype printed out: SADASSA SILVIA.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Again a pause, and then again the chug-chug. But instead of seeing words printed out I saw a snapshot: a girl with Afro-natural hair, a small worried face, and glasses. The girl held a notebook and clipboard. Across the bottom of the snapshot the teletype printed out a phone number, but I could not see it clearly enough to read it; the figures blurred. I understood that I was supposed to remember it, but there was no way I could. The transmitter was arriving from too distant a transmitter.
“Where are you?” I asked.
The teletype printed out: I DON’T KNOW. It seemed puzzled by the question; evidently it was a very low order of AI entity along the network.
“Look around you,” I told it. “See if you can find something in the way of writing. An address.”
Obligingly, the minor AI operator searched its environment; I could sense its local activity.
I HAVE FOUND AN ENVELOPE.
“What’s the address on it?” I said. “Read it.”
The ultramodern teletype printed out: F WALLOON. PORTUGUESE STATES OF AMERICA.
That made no sense to me. Portuguese States of America? An alternate universe? I was as puzzled as it was; neither of us knew where the transmission came from.
And then contact broke. The teletype machine faded out and I could no longer sense its presence. Bewildered, I woke to full consciousness. Had this interchange signified anything? Or, despite my subjective impression of lucidity, had I been totally befuddled by a dream state, altered consciousness without true rationality? Perhaps ‘Portuguese States of America’ merely symbolized a long distance away, another cosmos entirely. As far away as I could imagine: not to be taken literally.
I could still remember the face of the girl in the snapshot and the name Sadassa Silvia. Perhaps the low-order AI operator had reversed it; more likely it had been intended to read SILVIA SADASSA. The name meant nothing to me. I had never heard it before. Nor had I ever seen the little worried face with its mouth turned down at the corner as if in weary depression. The phone number, plus any other data it had intended for me, was lost forever; that had not gotten through, at least not to my conscious mind. I wondered what the snapshot and name signified. No way to tell. Nothing, now, no meaning at all. Perhaps, in time, higher-placed operators in the AI spectrum, along the communications network, would eventually fill in the missing pieces of information and make it clear.
I had already noticed that, rather than arriving in linear fashion, network printouts tended to reach me in staggered clusters, placed at random, so that no pattern could be discerned until the final—and most important—cluster had been transmitted. That way the transmitter held the key segment in its possession until the last moment possible, reducing what it had previously given me to a cipher.
As I returned to the bedroom, Johnny called to me from his bed. “Daddy, can I have a drink?”
From the tap in the bathroom I got him a glass of water. And then, in a state of half-sleep, not fully recovered from the disquieting experience with the low-level AI unit, I took a piece of bread from the kitchen; carrying the bread and the water I entered Johnny’s room. He was sitting up, reaching grumpily for the glass of water.
“Here is a game,” I said. It had to be done stealthily and rapidly, because of the Romans, and it had to be done in such a manner that if they happened to see they would understand nothing and think only that I was giving my son bread and water. Bending down, I gave him the piece of bread, and then, before he took the water, I inclined the glass playfully, as if by accident, and managed to splash it on his hair and forehead. Then, wiping it off with the sleeve of my pajama, I traced with my finger a cross of water on his forehead and said very quietly, under my breath so that only he and I could hear, words in Greek that I did not know the meaning of. Then, at once, I gave him the glass of water to drink from, and as he handed it back I kissed him and hugged him, as if spontaneously. It was done in an instant, this ritual of ceremony, this series of actions, whatever it was, something ancient which I knew to do by instinct. As I let go of my son I said into his ear, for only him to hear: “Your secret name is Paul. Remember that.”
Johnny gazed at me quizzically and then smiled. It was over. His real name had been given him, and under the correct circumstances.
“Good night,” I said aloud, and left his bedroom; behind me he rubbed at his moist hair and, sleepily, lay back in his bed.
What was all that about? I asked myself. In the dream transmission something had been freighted across to me on an unconscious level, instructions rather than information, concerning the welfare of my son.
When I returned to bed I had another dream concerning Sadassa Silvia. I heard music as I lay in sleep, astonishingly lovely music, a woman singing, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Gradually the guitar gave way to a small studio combo, and I heard, then, subtracks with backup vocals and the faint hint of an echo chamber. It was a professional production.
I thought, We should sign her up. She’s good.
Presently I found myself in my office at Progressive Records. I could still hear the girl singing, again with the solo guitar. She sang:
You have to put your slippers on
To walk toward the dawn.
As I listened, I picked up a new album which we had mastered. A mock-up of the artwork and layout had already been prepared: inspecting it critically, I saw that the singer was Sadassa Silvia; there, in addition to her name on the album cover, was her picture, the same Afro-natural hairstyle, the small worried face, the glasses. There was blurb material on the back, but I could not read it; the small letters blurred away.
That dream remained clear in my mind when I woke up the next morning. What a voice, I said to myself as I showered and shaved. In all my life I had never heard such a pure voice, so compelling; absolutely accurate in pitch, I realized critically. A soprano, something like Joan Baez; what we could do in the way of marketing a voice like that!
Thinking about Sadassa Silvia reawakened my concern about my job at Progressive. I had missed a lot of time; maybe I was ready now to go back. The dream was telling me that.
“Think you can make out okay alone?” I asked Rachel.
“Is your eyesight—”
“I can see well enough,” I said. “I think it was all the vitamin C1 was taking; it’s finally flushed out of my system, taking everything else with it.”
I spent one whole day walking around Placentia, enjoying myself immensely. There was a beauty in the trash of th
e alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision now seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language. It resembled the trail signs which I understood American Indians used, and as I walked along I felt the invisible presence of a great spirit which had gone before me—walked here and moved the unwanted debris in these subtle, meaningful ways so as to spell out a greeting of comradeship to me, the smaller one who would follow.
You can almost read this stuff, I thought to myself. But I couldn’t. All I could gather from the arrangements of trash was a participation in the passage of the great figure who had preceded me. He had left these discarded objects placed so that I would know he had been there, and in addition a golden illumination lay over them, a glow that told me something about his nature. He had brought the dust out of its obscurity into a kind of light; this was a good spirit indeed.
I had an acute feeling that the animals always saw this way, always were aware of who and what had passed along the alleys ahead of them. I was seeing with the hypervision associated with them. What a better world than our own, I reflected; it is so much more alive.
It was not so much that I had been exalted upward from my animal nature to the realm of the transcendent; actually I seemed closer to the animal world, more tuned to actual matter. Perhaps this was the first time I had really been at home in the world. I accepted all I saw and enjoyed it. I did not judge. And since I did not judge, there was nothing to reject.
I was ready to return to work. I felt cured. Having handled the shoe ad certainly helped. The crisis had come and gone. It did not disturb my tranquility to know that in point of fact I had not dealt with the shoe ad, but, rather, that it had been handled for me, by unseen entities. What would have demoralized me would have been their absence: if they had let me fall, incompetent and confused, alone.
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.
19ONE 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 monitor had steered me to her?
As she emerged from the ladies’ room I approached her, stopped her.
“Did you ever live in Placentia?” I asked her.
“I grew up there,” Sadassa Silvia said.
“Did you know Ferris Fremont?”
“No,” she said. “He had already moved to Oceanside when I was born.”
“I live in Placentia,” I said. “One night a friend and I found the name ‘Aramchek’ cut into the sidewalk.”
“My little brother did that
,” Sadassa Silvia said with a smile. “He had a stencil and he went around doing that.”
“It was down the block from the house where Ferris Fremont was born.”
“I know,” she said.
“Is there any connection between—”
“No,” she said very firmly. “It’s just a coincidence. I used to get asked that all the time when I used my real name.”
“‘Silvia’ isn’t your real name?”
“No; I’ve never been married. I had to start using another name because of Ferris Fremont. He made it impossible to live with the name ‘Aramchek.’ You can see that. I chose ‘Silvia,’ knowing that people would automatically turn it around and think I was named Silvia Sadassa.” She smiled, showing her perfect, lovely teeth.
I said. “I’m supposed to sign you up to a recording contract.”
“What doing? Playing my guitar?”
“Singing. You have a marvelous soprano voice; I’ve heard it.”
Matter-of-factly, Sadassa Silvia said. “I have a soprano voice; I sing in the church choir. I’m an Episcopalian. But it’s not a good voice; it’s not really trained. The best I can do is when I get a little drunk and sing bawdy hymns in the elevator of my apartment building.”
I said. “I can only tell you what I know.” Evidently much of what I knew didn’t add up. “Do you want me to go with you to personnel?” I asked. “And introduce you?”
“I talked to him.”
“Already?”
“He was coming out of his office. He says you’re not hiring. You’re overstaffed.”