Confessions of a Crap Artist

by Philip K. Dick

  How weird, Nathan thought, seeing a small boy whose ticket had not been collected standing hopefully at the train, holding his ticket up. Here, if you have a ticket, you're barred. If you don't then you can get on. The girls and Fay hurried toward the rear car, along with the others. His feet dragged; weighed down, he fell behind them. Children squeezed past him and hopped up into the cars.

  When he arrived at the last car he found that Fay and Elsie had already found places. The conductor started to close the wire door, and then seeing Bonnie, said to her,

  “Room for one more.”

  Lifting her up, he handed her to Fay, inside the car.

  Around Nathan, the other children without tickets disappeared into the cars. Only a few remained, and then only he remained on the platform. Everyone had been seated but him. The wire door on Fay's car had been locked and the conductor was starting away. Suddenly seeing him, the conductor said,

  “I forgot about you.”

  Nathan found himself smiling. Behind him, beyond the gate, the waiting people waved and shouted with sympathy. Or was it sympathy? He did not know. He found himself walking along with the conductor, back up the length of the train, toward the engine. The conductor prattled away, telling him how he had happened to overlook him. At the first car the conductor peered in and then said,

  “Here. You can get in here.”

  He clambered up, pushed through the little entrance, and found himself facing four Cub Scouts in blue uniforms. They stared at him as he tried to seat himself on the bench. At last he said to the first Cub Scout, “Why don't you move over?”

  The scout at once moved, and he was able to seat himself. His head brushed the roof of the car, and the angle was such that he had to hunch forward. He sat no taller than the scouts; only larger, more awkward, filling up more space—as the conductor had said. The wire door was locked and then the conductor signaled to the motorman.

  After a series of noises the train jerked and began to move.

  Under Nathan's feet the floor drummed; the train vibrated steadily, without variation. They moved away from the platform and the waving, shouting people. Almost at once they found themselves out of Fairyland, among oak trees and grass.

  Seated so far up in the train, he could look out at the tail of the engine and, beyond that, the area toward which they were moving. He saw the track ahead of them, the slopes of grass, a road to the right. Beyond the road were more oak trees and then the lake. Now and then he made out the sight of picnickers. They glanced up at the train, and once, the Cub Scout next to him started to wave and then nervously changed his mind. No one in the car spoke. The noise of the wheels was so constant that no one expected it to stop; they all sat patiently riding, gazing out, contemplating.

  On and on the train went, always at the same rate of speed.

  The unvarying noise and vibration and pace of the train took the fatigue out of his legs. Cramped as he was he began to feel more at peace. The oak trees lulled him. The inevitability of the train's progress … always ahead of them he saw the track, the two rails, and there was nothing else the train could do but follow it. And nothing else that any of them could do but remain where they were, cooped up in the little irregular cars, locked in by their wire doors, hunched and huddled in whatever postures they had first assumed. Their knees touched; their heads almost touched; they could not even look at one another unless luck happened to have put them facing that way. And yet none of them objected. No one complained or tried to stir.

  How odd I must look, he thought to himself. In here with these Cub Scouts in their blue uniforms. One bulging, misshapen adult crowded in where he shouldn't be. Where several children should be, on a child's train, in a child's amusement park. Did the City of Oakland anticipate me? Certainly they had not. This is the luck of the schlimozl, he thought. Put up forward here, away from Fay and the girls. Riding alone here while they ride together in back.

  But it stirred no real emotions in him. He experienced a relaxation of physical tension; nothing more.

  Is that all that is wrong? he asked himself. Merely the accumulation of tensions, worries, fears? Nothing of lasting importance? Can the constant vibrations of a children's train soothe me and take away whatever it is that confronts me? This sense of dismay and doom…

  He no longer felt the dread, the intuition that he had been moved against his will into a situation built for another person's use.

  He thought, There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring.

  When I met her, or rather, when she looked out of her car window and saw me and Gwen … that was when the decision was made, assuming that it ever was. She made it, as soon as she saw us, and the rest was inevitable.

  Probably she will make a good wife, he thought. She will be loyal to me, and try to help me do what I want to do. Her passion toward controlling me will ultimately subside; all of this energy in her will fade. I will make substantial changes in her, too. We will alter each other. And someday it will be impossible to tell who has led whom. And why.

  The only fact, he realized, will be that we are married and living together, that I will be earning a living, that we will have two girls from a previous marriage and possibly children of our own. A valid question will be: Are we happy? But only time will tell that. And not even Fay can underwrite the answer to that; she is as dependent as I am, in that final area.

  He thought, She could bring about everything that she wants and still be wretched. Out of this I could emerge as the prosperous one, the peaceful one. And neither of us can possibly know.

  When the train had finished its trip and was returning to the platform he saw the people lined up for their ride. The Cub Scout next to him plucked up his courage at last and waved; some of the people waved back, and that encouraged other scouts to wave.

  Nathan waved, too.

  20

  With the money I received from my sister as cash payment for my equity in the house I opened a checking account at the Bank of America at Point Reyes Station. As soon as possible—after all, there wasn't much time left—I set out to buy the things I needed.

  First, I paid two hundred dollars for a horse and had it brought to the house by truck and let loose in the back pasture. It was almost the same color as Charley's horse, possibly a little darker, but the same size, as far as I could tell, and in as good physical shape. It ran around for a day or so and then it calmed down and began to crop grass. After that it seemed perfectly at home.

  I then set out to buy sheep, the black-faced kind. With this I had more trouble. In the end I had to go all the way to Petaluma for them. I paid about fifty dollars apiece for them, three ewes. As far as lambs went, I was undecided at first. Finally I came to the conclusion that he hadn't considered the lambs his, so I did not get any.

  Getting a collie like Bing was really hard. I had to take the bus down to San Francisco and go shopping at various kennels before I found one that was the same variety. There are all sorts of collies, costing different prices. The one resembling Bing cost almost two hundred dollars, virtually as much as the horse.

  The ducks cost me only a dollar and a half apiece. I got them locally.

  My reasoning was that I wanted everything set up the way it was supposed to be. It seemed to me that there was a very good chance that on April twenty-third Charley Hume would come back to life. Of course, this was not a certainty. The future never is. Anyhow, I felt that this increased the chances. According to the Bible, when the world ends the dead arise from their graves at the sound of the last trumpet. In fact, that's one of the ways that the end of the world is known to be coming, when the dead arise. It's a piece of strong verification of the theory. During the month that I lived there in the house I felt his presence grow more and more re
al, as he neared closer and closer to the moment of his return to life.

  I felt it especially at night. Beyond any doubt he was close to resuming his existence in this world. His ashes—he had been cremated, according to the terms of his will—had been sent by error to the Mayfair Market, and there Doctor Sebastian had picked them up (the clerks at the Mayfair had telephoned him and explained the situation) and had driven them out to Fay. She had taken them into the ocean. So when he returned, he would do so in the Point Reyes area, and with his house exactly like it had been, with the horse and dog and sheep and ducks, all of which had belonged to him, he was sure to arise there.

  In the afternoons, when the wind from the Point was strongest, I could go outdoors on to the patio and actually see the bits of ash in the air. In fact, several people in the neighborhood remarked on the unusual concentration of ash in the air near sunset. This gave the setting sun a deep reddish color. Beyond any doubt, something of vast importance was about to happen; you could feel it, even if you hadn't been warned.

  Every day that passed put me into a greater state of excitement. Toward the end of the month I was hardly sleeping at all.

  When April twenty-third arrived I woke up while it was still dark. I lay in bed awhile, so keyed-up that I could barely stand it. Then at five-thirty a.m. I got out of bed and got dressed and ate breakfast. All I could get down was a bowl of Wheat Chex, incidentally. And a dish of applesauce. I lit a fire in the fireplace in the living room and then I began walking around the house. I didn't know exactly where Charley would first be seen, so I tried to cover every part of the house, be in each room at least once every fifteen minutes.

  By noon I was so conscious of him that I kept turning my head and catching a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. But at two o'clock I had a distinct feeling of let-down. I had a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk and that made me feel better, but the sense of his presence did not become any stronger.

  When six o'clock came, and he still hadn't come back to life, I began to become uneasy. So I telephoned Mrs. fiambro.

  “Hello,” she said, in that hoarse voice.

  I said, “This is Jack Seville.” (What I meant, of course, was Jack Isidore.) “I wondered if you'd noted anything definitive.”

  “We're meditating,” she said. “I thought you would be with us. Didn't you catch our telepathic message?”

  “When was it sent out?” I asked.

  “Two days ago,” she said. “At midnight, when the lines are strongest.”

  “I didn't get it,” I said in agitation. “Anyhow, I have to be over here at the house. I'm waiting for Charley Hume to come back to life.”

  “Well, I think you should be here,” she said, and I noticed a real hint of crossness in her voice. “There may be a good reason why we aren't getting the expected results.”

  “You mean, it's my fault?” I demanded. “Because I'm not there?”

  “There has to be some reason,” she said. “I don't see why you have to stay there and wait for that particular person to come back to life.”

  We argued awhile, and then hung up with less than the most amiable feelings. Again I began pacing around the house, looking this time into every closet, in case he returned and found himself shut in where he couldn't get out.

  At eleven-thirty that evening I was really getting worried. I again telephoned Mrs. Hambro, but this time got no answer. By a quarter of twelve I was virtually out of my mind with worry. I had the radio on and was listening to a program of dance music and news. Finally the announcer said that in one minute it would be twelve midnight. He gave a commercial for United Airlines. Then it was twelve. Charley hadn't come back to life. And it was April twenty-fourth. The world hadn't come to an end.

  I was never so disconcerted in my entire life.

  Looking back on it, the thing that really gets me is that I had sold my interest in the house for next to nothing. My sister had gotten it away from me, taking advantage of me the way she takes advantage of everyone. And I had restocked the place with a horse and dog and sheep and ducks. What did I get out of it? Very little.

  I sat down in the big easy chair in the living room, feeling that I had reached the really low point in my life. I was so depressed that I could hardly think; my mind was in a state of complete chaos. All my data rattled and made no sense.

  Out of it all I realized that there was simply no doubt. The group had been wrong.

  Not only had Charley Hume not returned to life but the world had not come to an end, and I realized that a long time ago Charley was right in what he said about me; namely, that I was a crap artist. All the facts that I had learned were just so much crap.

  I realized, sitting there, that I was a nut.

  What a thing to realize. All those years wasted. I saw it as clearly as hell; all that business about the Sargasso Sea, and Lost Atlantis, and flying saucers and people coming out of the inner part of the earth—it was just a lot of crap. So the supposedly ironic title of my work wasn't ironic at all. Or possibly it was doubly ironic, that it was actually crap but I didn't realize it, etc. In any case, I was really horrified. All those people over in Inverness Park were a bunch of cranks. Mrs. Hambro was a psycho or something. Possibly even worse than me.

  No wonder Charley left me a thousand dollars for psychoanalysis. I was really on the verge of the pit.

  Good god, there hadn't even been an earthquake.

  Now what was there left for me to do? I had a few more days left to me in the house, and a couple of hundred dollars of the cash that Fay and Nathan had given me. Enough money to get back to the Bay Area and relocate myself in a decent apartment, and possibly be able to find a job of some sort. I probably could go back and work for Mr. Poity at One-Day Dealers' Tire Service, although he had gotten all he could stand of my crap.

  So I wasn't really so bad off.

  Of course, it's unwise to go overboard in blaming myself. I had had a theory, which couldn't be verified until April twenty-third, and therefore until that time it couldn't positively be said that I was out of my mind for believing it. After all, the world might have come to an end. Anyhow, it did not. All those people like Fay and Charley and Nat Anteil were right.

  They were right, but thinking about them I came to the conclusion, after a long period of hard meditation, that they were not a hell of a lot better than me. I mean, there's a lot of rubbish in what they have to say, too. They're darn near a bunch of nuts in their own way, although possibly it isn't quite so obvious as in my case.

  For instance, anybody who kills himself is a nut. Let's face it (as Fay says). And even at the time I was conscious that his killing all those helpless animals was an example of the lunatic brain at work. And then that nut Nathan Anteil who just got married to a very nice girl and then dumped her as soon as he got mixed up with my sister … that isn't exactly a model of logic. To get rid of a sweet harmless woman for a shrew like Fay.

  As far as I'm concerned, the nuttiest of all is my sister, and she's still the worst; take my word for it. She's a psychopath. To her, everybody else is just an object to be moved around. She had the mind of a three-year-old. Is that sanity?

  So it doesn't seem to me that I should be the only person who has to bear the onus of believing an admittedly ridiculous notion. All I want is to see the blame spread around fairly. For a day or so I considered writing to the San Rafael newspapers and giving them the story in the form of a letter to the editor; after all, they have to print that. It's their duty as a public service. But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. In fact, the whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down.

  After thinking it all over, and weighing every consideration, I decided to avail myself of the clause in Charley Hume's will and take the thousand dollars worth of psychoanalysis. So I collected all my things that I had around the house, packed them up, and got a neighbor to drive me down to the Greyhound. A couple of
days before I had to I left the house that Charley and Fay had built—Fay's house—and started back to the Bay Area.

  As the bus drove along I considered how I would locate the best analyst. In the end I decided to get the names of every one of them practicing in the Bay Area, and visit each of them in turn. In my mind I began putting together a questionnaire for them to fill out, telling the number of patients they had had, the number of cures, the number of total failures, length of time involved in cures, number of partial cures, etc. So on the basis of that I could draw up a chart and compute which analyst would be the most likely to give me help.

  It seemed to me that the least I could do was try to use Charley's money wisely and not squander it on some charlatan. And on the basis of past choices, it seems pretty evident that my judgment is not of the best.

  Copyright © 1975 by Philip K. Dick

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a

  division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published by Entwhistle Books, in 1975.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dick, Philip K.

  Confessions of a crap artist—Jack Isidore (of Seville, Calif.):

  a chronicle of verified scientific fact, 1945-1959 / Philip K. Dick.

  —1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49455-9

  I. Title.

  PS3554.I3C6 1992

  813′.54—dc20 91-50969

  CIP

  For information about the Philip K. Dick Society, write to:

  PKDS, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442.