This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists

A "hylozoist" believes that the universe is alive; it's about the same idea as pan-psychism, that everything is animated. Pan-psychism or hylozoism falls into two belief-classes:

1) Each object is independently alive.

2) Everything is one unitary entity; the universe is one thing, alive, with one mind.

Fat had found a land of middle ground. The universe con­sists of one vast irrational entity into which has broken a high-order life form which camouflages itself by a sophisti­cated mimicry; thereby as long as it cares to it remains-by us-undetected. It mimics objects and causal processes (this is what Fat claims); not just objects but what the objects do. From this, you can gather that Fat conceives of Zebra as very large.

After a year of analyzing his encounter with Zebra, or God, or the Logos, whatever, Fat came first to the conclusion that it had invaded our universe; and a year later he realized that it was consuming-that is, devouring-our universe. Ze­bra accomplished this by a process much like transubstantia-tion. This is the miracle of communion in which the two species, the wine and bread, invisibly become the blood and body of Christ.

Instead of seeing this in church, Fat had seen it out in the world; and not in micro-form but in macro-form, which is to say, on a scale so vast that he could not estimate its limits. The entire universe, possibly, is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord. And with this process comes not just sentience but-sanity. For Fat this would be a blessed relief. He had put up with insanity for too long, both in himself and outside himself. Nothing could have pleased him more.

If Fat was psychotic, you must admit that it is a strange sort of psychosis to believe that you have encountered an in-breaking of the rational into the irrational. How do you treat it? Send the afflicted person back to square one? In that case, he is now cut off from the rational. This makes no sense, in terms of therapy; it is an oxymoron, a verbal contradiction.

But an even more basic semantic problem lies exposed, here. Suppose I say to Fat, or Kevin says to Fat, "You did not experience God. You merely experienced something with the qualities and aspects and nature and powers and wisdom and goodness of God." This is like the joke about the Ger­man proclivity toward double abstractions; a German author­ity on English literature declares, " Hamlet was not written by Shakespeare; it was merely written by a man named

Shakespeare." In English the distinction is verbal and with­out meaning, although German as a language will express the difference (which accounts for some of the strange features of the German mind).

"I saw God," Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, "No, you just saw something like God. Exactly like God." And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, "What is truth?"

Zebra broke through into our universe and fired beam af­ter beam of information-rich colored light at Fat's brain, right through his skull, blinding him and fucking him up and dazing and dazzling him, but imparting to him knowledge beyond the telling. For openers, it saved Christopher's life.

More accurately speaking, it didn't break through to fire the information; it had at some past date broken through. What it did was step forward out of its state of camouflage; it disclosed itself as set to ground and fired information at a rate our calculations will not calibrate; it fired whole libraries at him in nanoseconds. And it continued to do this for eight hours of real elapsed time. Many nanoseconds exist in eight hours of RET. At flash-cut speed you can load the right hem­isphere of the human brain with a titanic quantity of graphic data.

Paul of Tarsus had a similar experience. A long time ago. Much of it he refused to discuss. According to his own state­ment, much of the information fired at his head-right be­tween the eyes, on his trip to Damascus-died with him unsaid. Chaos reigns in the universe, but St. Paul knew who he had talked to. He mentioned that. Zebra, too, identified it­self, to Fat. It termed itself "St. Sophia," a designation unfa­miliar to Fat. "St. Sophia" is an unusual hypostasis of Christ.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other. But God-the true God-has penetrated both, penetrated man and penetrated the world, and sobers the landscape. But that God, the God from outside, encounters fierce opposition. Frauds-the deceptions of madness-abound and mask them­selves as their mirror opposite: pose as sanity. The masks, however, wear thin and the madness reveals itself. It is an ugly thing.

The remedy is here but so is the malady. As Fat repeats obsessively, "The Empire never ended." In a startling re­sponse to the crisis, the true God mimics the universe, the

very region he has invaded: he takes on the likeness of sticks and trees and beer cans in gutters-he presumes to be trash discarded, debris no longer noticed. Lurking, the true God literally ambushes reality and us as well. God, in very truth, attacks and injures us, in his role as antidote. As Fat can testify to, it is a scary experience to be bushwhacked by the Living God. Hence we say, the true God is in the habit of concealing himself. Twenty-five hundred years have passed since Heraclitus wrote, "Latent form is the master of obvious form," and, "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself."

So the rational, like a seed, lies concealed within the irra­tional bulk. What purpose does the irrational bulk serve? Ask yourself what Gloria gained by dying; not in terms of her death vis-à-vis herself but in terms of those who loved her. She paid back their love with-well, with what? Malice? Not proven. Hate? Not proven. With the irrational? Yes; proven. In terms of the effect on her friends-such as Fat-no lucid purpose was served but purpose there was: purpose without purpose, if you can conceive of that. Her motive was no mo­tive. We're talking about nihilism. Under everything else, even under death itself and the will toward death, lies some­thing else and that something else is nothing. The bedrock basic stratum of reality is irreality; the universe is irrational because it is built not on mere shifting sand-but on that which is not.

No help to Fat to know this: the why of Gloria's taking him with her-or doing her best to-when she went. "Bitch," he could have said if he could have grabbed her. "Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me."

The bad news coming down the pipe for Fat was merci­fully still unknown to him, at this point, at the time of his discharge from North Ward. He could not return to Beth, so who could he return to, when he hit the outside world? In his mind, during his stay at North Ward, Sherri, who was in remission from her cancer, had faithfully visited him. There­fore Fat had engrammed onto her, believing that if he had one true friend in all the world it was Sherri Solvig. His plan had unfolded like a bright star: he would live with Sherri,

helping to keep up her morale during her remission, and if she lost her remission, he would care for her as she had cared for him during his time in the hospital.

In no sense had Dr. Stone cured Fat, when the motor driving Fat got later exposed. Fat homed in on death more rapidly and more expertly this time than he had ever done before. He had become a professional at seeking out pain; he had learned the rules of the game and now knew how to play. What Fat in his lunacy-acquired from a lunatic uni­verse; branded so by Fat's own analysis-sought was to be dragged down along with someone who wanted to die. Had he gone through his address book he could not have yielded up a better source than Sherri, "Smart move, Fat," I would have told him if I had known what he was planning for his future, during his stay at North Ward. "You've really scored this time." I knew Sherri; I knew she spent all her time trying to figure out a way to lose her remission. I knew that because she expressed fury and hatred, constantly, at the doctors who had saved her. But I did not know what Fat had planned. Fat kept it a secret, even from Sherri. I will help her, Fat said to himself in the depths of his fried mind. I will help Sherri stay healthy but if and when she gets sick again, there I will be at her side, ready to do anything for her.

His error, when deconstructed, amounted to this: Sherri did not merely plan to get sick again; she like Gloria planned to take as many people with her as possible-in direct propor­tion to their love toward her. Fat loved her and, worse, felt gratitude toward her. Out of this clay, Sherri could throw a pot with the warped kickwheel she used as a brain that would smash what Leon Stone had done, smash what Steph­anie had done, smash what God had done. Sherri had more power in her weakened body than all these other enti­ties combined, including the living God.

Fat had decided to bind himself to the Antichrist. And out of the highest possible motives: out of love, gratitude and the desire to help her.

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

* * *

Sherri Solvig, being poor, lived in a tiny rundown room with no kitchen; she had to wash her dishes in the bathroom sink. The ceiling showed a vast water stain, from a toilet up­stairs which had overflowed. Having visited her there a cou­ple of times Fat knew the place and considered it depressing. He had the impression that if Sherri moved out and into a nice apartment, a modern one, and with a kitchen, her spirits would pick up.

Needless to say, the realization had never penetrated to Fat's mind that Sherri sought out this kind of abode. Her dingy surroundings came as a result of her affliction, not as a cause; she could recreate these conditions wherever she went-which Fat eventually discovered.

At this point in time, however, Fat had geared up his mental and physical assembly line to turn out an endless series of good acts toward the person who, before all other persons, had visited him in the cardiac intensive care ward and later at North Ward. Sherri had official documents de­claring her a Christian. Twice a week she took communion and one day she would enter a religious order. Also, she called her priest by his first name. You cannot get any closer to piety than that.

A couple of times Fat had told Sherri about his encounter with God. This hadn't impressed her, since Sherri Solvig be­lieved that one encounters God only through channels. She herself had access to these channels, which is to say her priest Larry.

Once Fat had read to Sherri from the Britannica about the "secrecy theme" in Mark and Matthew, the idea that Christ veiled his teachings in parable form so that the multitude-that is, the many outsiders-would not understand him and so would not be saved. Christ, according to this view or theme, intended salvation only for his little flock. The Britannica dis­cussed this up front.

"That's bullshit," Sherri said.

Fat said, "You mean this Britannica is wrong or the Bible is wrong? The Britannica is just-"

"The Bible doesn't say that," Sherri said, who read the Bible all the time, or at least had a copy of it always with her.

It took Fat hours to find the citation in Luke; finally he had it, to set before Sherri:

"His disciples asked him what this parable might

mean, and he said, 'The mysteries of the kingdom

of God are revealed to you; for the rest there are

only parables, so that they might see but not per-

ceive, listen but not understand.' " (Luke 8:9/10).

"I'll ask Larry if that's one of the corrupt parts of the Bible," Sherri said.

Pissed off, Fat said irritably, "Sherri, why don't you cut out all the sections of the Bible you agree with and paste them together? And not have to deal with the rest."

"Don't be snippy," Sherri said, who was hanging up clothes in her tiny closet.

Nonetheless, Fat imagined that basically he and Sherri shared a commond [sic] bond. They both agreed that God existed; Christ had died to save man; people who didn't believe this didn't know what was going on. He had confided to her that he had seen God, news which Sherri received placidly (at that moment she had been ironing).

"It's called a theophany," Fat said. "Or an epiphany."

"An epiphany," Sherri said, pacing her voice to the rate of her slow ironing, "is a feast celebrated on January sixth, marking the baptism of Christ. I always go. Why don't you go? It's a lovely service. You know, I heard this joke-" She droned on. Hearing this, Fat was mystified. He decided to change the subject; now Sherri had switched to an account of an instance when Larry-who was Father Minter to Fat- had poured the sacramental wine down the front of a kneeling female communicant's low-cut dress.

"Do you think John the Baptist was an Essene?" he asked Sherri.

Never at any time did Sherri Solvig admit she didn't know the answer to a theological question; the closest she came surfaced in the form of responding, "I'll ask Larry." To Fat she now said calmly, "John the Baptist was Elijah who re­turns before Christ comes. They asked Christ about that and he said John the Baptist was Elijah who had been promised."

"But was he an Essene."

Pausing momentarily in her ironing, Sherri said, "Didn't the Essenes live in the Dead Sea?"

"Well, at the Qumran Wadi."

"Didn't your friend Bishop Pike die in the Dead Sea?"

Fat had known Jim Pike, a fact he always proudly nar­rated to people given a pretext. "Yes," he said. "Jim and his wife had driven out onto the Dead Sea Desert in a Ford Cortina. They had two bottles of Coca-Cola with them; that's all."

"You told me," Sherri said, resuming her ironing.

"What I could never figure out," Fat said, "is why they didn't drink the water in the car radiator. That's what you do when your car breaks down in the desert and you're stranded." For years Fat had brooded about Jim Pike's death. He imagined that it was somehow tied in with the murders of the Kennedys and Dr. King, but he had no evidence whatsoever for it.

"Maybe they had anti-freeeze in their radiator," Sherri said.

"In the Dead Sea Desert?"

Sherri said, "My car has been giving me trouble. The man at the Exxon station on Seventeenth says that the motor mounts are loose. Is that serious?"

Not wanting to talk about Sherri's beat-up old car but wanting instead to rattle on about Jim Pike, Fat said, "I don't know." He tried to think how to get the topic back to his friend's perplexing death but could not.

"That damn car," Sherri said.

"You didn't pay anything for it; that guy gave it to you."

" 'Didn't pay anything'? He made me feel like he owned me for giving me that damn car."

"Remind me never to give you a car," Fat said.

All the clues lay before him that day. If you did something for Sherri she felt she should feel gratitude-which she did not-and this she interpreted as a burden, a despised obliga­tion. However, Fat had a ready rationalization for this, which he had already begun to employ. He did not do things for Sherri to get anything back; ergo, he did not expect grati­tude. Ergo, if he did not get it that was okay.

What he failed to notice that not only was there no grati­tude (which he could psychologically handle) but downright malice showed itself instead. Fat had noted this but had written it off as nothing more than irritability, a form of im­patience. He could not believe that someone would return malice for assistance. Therefore he discounted the testimony of his senses.

Once, when I lectured at the University of California at Fullerton, a student asked me for a short, simple definition of reality. I thought it over and answered, "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."

Fat did not believe that Sherri returned malice for as­sistance given her. But that failure to believe changed noth­ing. Therefore her response lay within the framework of what we call "reality." Fat, whether he liked it or not, would in some way have to deal with it, or else stop seeing Sherri socially.

One of the reasons Beth left Fat stemmed from his visits to Sherri at her rundown room in Santa Ana. Fat had deluded himself into believing that he visited her out of charity. Actu­ally he had become horny, due to the fact that Beth had lost interest in him sexually and he was not, as they say, getting any. In many ways Sherri struck him as pretty; in fact Sherri was pretty; we all agreed. During her chemotherapy she wore a wig. David had been fooled by the wig and often complimented her on her hair, which amused her. We re­garded this as macabre, on both their parts.

In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Mas­ochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain-any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes con­trol over the situation in the only way open to him: he con­nives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he en­joys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer en­dure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he be­comes, automatically, anhedonic (which means being unable or unwilling to enjoy pleasure). Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he

does not give way to impulse. He has control. Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not consciously aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessen­ing this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he derives no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essentially negative.

Sherri Solvig had had cancer, lymphatic cancer, but due to valiant efforts by her doctors she had gone into remission. However, encoded in the memory-tapes of her brain was the datum that patients with lymphoma who go into remission usually eventually lose their remission. They aren't cured; the ailment has somehow mysteriously passed from a palpable state into a sort of metaphysical state, a limbo. It is there but it is not there. So despite her current good health, Sherri (her mind told her) contained a ticking clock, and when the clock chimed she would die. Nothing could be done about it, except the frantic promotion of a second remission. But even if a second remission were obtained, that remission, too, by the same logic, the same inexorable process, would end.

Time had Sherri in its absolute power. Time contained one outcome for her: terminal cancer. This is how her mind had factored the situation out; it had come to this conclusion, and no matter how good she felt or what she had going for her in her life, this face remained a constant. A cancer patient in re­mission, then, represents a stepped-up case of the status of all humans; eventually you are going to die.

In the back of her mind, Sherri thought about death cease­lessly. Everything else, all people, objects and processes had become reduced to the status of shadows. Worse yet, when she contemplated other people she contemplated the injustice of the universe. They did not have cancer. This meant that, psychologically speaking, they were immortal. This was un­fair. Everyone had conspired to rob her of her youth, her happiness and eventually her life; in place of those, everyone else had piled infinite pain on her, and probably they secretly enjoyed it. "Enjoying themselves" and "enjoying it" amount­ed to the same evil thing. Sherri, therefore, had motivation

for wishing that the whole world would go to hell in a hand-basket.

Of course, she did not say this aloud. But she lived it. Due to her cancer she had become totally anhedonic. How can one deny the sense in this? Logically, Sherri should have squeezed every moment of pleasure out of life during her re­mission, but the mind does not function logically, as Fat had figured out. Sherri spent her time anticipating the loss of her remission.

In this respect she did not postpone gratification; she en­joyed her returning lymphoma now.

Fat couldn't make this complex mental process out. He only saw a young woman who had suffered a lot and who had been dealt a bum hand. He reasoned that he could im­prove her life. That was a good thing to do. He would love her, love himself and God would love the both of them. Fat saw love, and Sherri saw impending pain and death over which she had no control. There can be no meeting of such two different worlds.

In summary (as Fat would say), the modem-day mas-ochist does not enjoy pain; he simply can't stand being help­less. "Enjoying pain" is a semantic contradiction, as certain philosophers and psychologists have pointed out. "Pain" is defined as something that you experience as unpleasant. "Unpleasant" is defined as something you don't want. Try to define it otherwise and see where it gets you. "Enjoying pain" means "enjoying what you find unpleasant." Reik had the handle on the situation; he decoded the true dynamism of modern attenuated masochism... and saw it spread out among almost all of us, in one form or another and to some degree. It has become an ubiquity.

One could not correctly accuse Sherri of enjoying cancer. Or even wanting to have cancer. But she believed that cancer lay in the deck of cards in front of her, buried some­where in the pack; she turned one card over each day, and each day cancer failed to show up. But if that card is in the pack and you are turning the cards over one by one eventu­ally you will turn the cancer card over, and there it ends.

So, through no real fault of her own, Sherri was primed to fuck Fat over as he had never been fucked over before. The difference between Gloria Knudson and Sherri was obvious; Gloria wanted to die for strictly imaginary reasons. Sherri

would literally die whether she wanted to or not. Gloria had the option to cease playing her malignant death-game any time she psychologically wished, but Sherri did not. It was as if Gloria, upon smashing herself to bits on the pavement be­low the Oakland Synanon Building, had been reborn twice the size with twice the mental strength. Meanwhile, Beth's leaving with Christopher had whittled Horselover Fat down to half his normal size. The odds did not favor a sanguine outcome.

The actual motivation in Fat's head for feeling attracted to Sherri was the locking-in onto death which had begun with Gloria. But, imagining that Dr. Stone had cured him, Fat now sailed out into the world with renewed hope-sailed unerringly into madness and death; he had learned nothing. True, the bullet had been pulled from his body and the wound healed. But he was primed for another, eager for an­other. He couldn't wait to move in with Sherri and save her.

If you'll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat had 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.

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 the 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 positions 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 funished 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; shell 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 Yaldabaoth. 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 Zoroas-trianism 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 her 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 those 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?

Sherri even resented her own sister, who had sheltered, fed and cared for her all the time she was sick. The reason: Mae drove a Mercedes-Benz and had a rich husband. But most of all Sherri resented the career of her best friend Eleanor, who had become a nun.

"Here I am throwing up in Santa Ana," Sherri frequently said, "and Eleanor's walking around in a habit in Las Vegas."

"You're not throwing up now," Fat pointed out. "You're in remission."

"But she doesn't know that. What kind of place is Las Vegas for a religious order? She's probably peddling her ass in-"

"You're talking about a nun," Fat said, who had met Eleanor; he had liked her.

"I'd be a nun by now if I hadn't gotten sick," Sherri said.

To escape from Sherri's nattering drivel, Fat shut himself up in the bedroom he used as a study and began working once more on his great exegesis. He had done almost 300,000 words, mostly holographically, but from the inferior bulk he had begun to extract what he termed his Tractate: Cryptica Scriptura (see Appendix p. 215), which simply means "hid­den discourse." Fat found the Latin more impressive as a tide.

At this point in his Meisterwerk he had begun patiently to fabricate his cosmogony, which is the technical term for, "How the cosmos came into existence." Few individuals com­pose cosmogonies; usually entire cultures, civilizations, people or tribes are required: a cosmogony is a group production, evolving down through the ages. Fat well knew this, and prided himself on having invented his own. He called it: