"The two-word text message," I said. " 'KING FELIX.' "

Letterman said, "I didn't find her. In the pyramids."

"I see," I said.

"But she is somewhere, I know it. I will never give up." He returned the photos to their manila folder, put it back in the briefcase and closed it up.

Today Letterman is in Turkey. He sent us a postcard showing the mosque which used to be the great Christian church called St. Sophia or Hagia Sophia, one of the wonders of the world, even though the roof collapsed during the Middle Ages and had to be rebuilt. Hagia Sophia shares design principles with yurts. The central portion of the church seems to float, as if rising to heaven; anyhow that was the idea the Roman emperor Justinian had when he built it. He personally supervised the construction and he himself named it, a code name for Christ.

Belief is the problem. Listening is the solution. It has to do, by definition, with things you can't prove. For example, this last Saturday evening I had the TV set on; I wasn't really watching it, I just sit with Jackson and talk with him about what is happening and mute the commercials. Anyhow I don't watch TV; it has become impossible. Anyhow, last Saturday on Cartoon Network they ran the usual string of commercials and for some reason at one point my conscious attention was attract­ed; I stopped what I had been doing and became fully alert in the yurt.

On the screen the words FOOD KING appeared-and then they cut instantly, rushing their film along as fast as possible so as to squeeze in as many commercial messages as possible; what came next was a Felix the Cat cartoon, an old black-and-white cartoon. One moment FOOD KING appeared on the

There it had been, the juxtaposed cypher, and in the proper order:

But you would only pick it up subliminally. And who would be catching this accidental, purely accidental, juxta­position? Only children, the little children of Central Pennslyvania. It wouldn't mean anything to them; they would apprehend no two-word cypher, and even if they did they wouldn't un­derstand what it meant, who it referred to.

But I had seen it and I knew who it referred to. It must be only synchronicity, as Jung calls it, I thought. Coincidence, without intent.

Or had the signal gone out? Out over the airwaves by one of the largest TV networks in the world reaching many thousands of children with this split-second information, preparing to market them pre-sweetened cereals in ads which would be processed by the right hemispheres of their brains: received and stored and perhaps decoded, below the threshold of consciousness where many things lay slumbering and stored, a toy in the bottom of the Captain Crunch box.

And Peter Frampton had absolutely nothing to do with this. I swear. Just some server and some technician at Cartoon Network with a whole stack of commercials to run, in any order. It would have to be VALIS itself re­sponsible, if anything had arranged the juxtaposition inten­tionally, VALIS which itself was this information, the sudden awareness between frames.

Maybe I had seen VALIS just now, surfing between a commercial and then a kids' cartoon.

The message has been sent out again, I said to myself.

Two days later Fampton mailed me; He had new lyrics:

Be fruitful and increase, fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds increase on the land. and let grasshoppers not carry guns.