Vintage PKD

by Philip K. Dick

  Most insanity can be identified with the bizarre and the theatrical. You put a pan on your head and a towel around your waist, paint yourself purple and go outdoors. Gloria was as calm as she had ever been; polite and civilized. If she had lived in ancient Rome or Japan, she would have gone unnoticed. Her driving skills probably remained unimpaired. She would stop at every red light and not exceed the speed limit—on her trip to pick up the ten Nembutals.

  I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity. I did not love Gloria Knudson, but I liked her. In Berkeley, she and her husband had given elegant parties, and my wife and I always got invited. Gloria spent hours fixing little sandwiches and served different wines, and she dressed up and looked lovely, with her sandy-colored short-cut curly hair.

  Anyhow, Horselover Fat had no Nembutal to give her, and a week later Gloria threw herself out of a tenth floor window of the Synanon Building in Oakland, California, and smashed herself to bits on the pavement along MacArthur Boulevard, and Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe. Fat was ahead of his time, ahead of the universe. Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future. For two months, after he learned of Gloria’s suicide, he cried and watched TV and took more dope—his brain was going too, but he didn’t know it. Infinite are the mercies of God.

  As a matter of fact, Fat had lost his own wife, the year before, to mental illness. It was like a plague. No one could discern how much was due to drugs. This time in America—1960 to 1970— and this place, the Bay Area of Northern California, was totally fucked. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s the truth. Fancy terms and ornate theories cannot cover this fact up. The authorities became as psychotic as those they hunted. They wanted to put all persons who were not clones of the establishment away. The authorities were filled with hate. Fat had seen police glower at him with the ferocity of dogs. The day they moved Angela Davis, the black Marxist, out of the Marin County jail, the authorities dismantled the whole civic center. This was to baffle radicals who might intend trouble. The elevators got unwired; doors got relabeled with spurious information; the district attorney hid. Fat saw all this. He had gone to the civic center that day to return a library book. At the electronic hoop at the civic center entrance, two cops had ripped open the book and papers that Fat carried. He was perplexed. The whole day perplexed him. In the cafeteria, an armed cop watched everyone eat. Fat returned home by cab, afraid of his own car and wondering if he was nuts. He was, but so was everyone else.

  I am by profession, a science-fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy. Nonetheless, Gloria Knudson lies in a box in Modesto, California. There’s a photo of her funeral wreaths in my photo album. It’s a color photo so you can see how lovely the wreaths are. In the background a VW is parked. I can be seen crawling into the VW, in the midst of the service. I am not able to take any more.

  After the graveside service Gloria’s former husband Bob and I and some tearful friend of his—and hers—had a late lunch at a fancy restaurant in Modesto near the cemetery. The waitress seated us in the rear because the three of us looked like hippies even though we had suits and ties on. We didn’t give a shit. I don’t remember what we talked about. The night before, Bob and I— I mean, Bob and Horselover Fat—drove to Oakland to see the movie Patton. Just before the graveside service Fat met Gloria’s parents for the first time. Like their deceased daughter, they treated him with utmost civility. A number of Gloria’s friends stood around the corny California ranch-style living room recalling the person who linked them together. Naturally, Mrs. Knudson wore too much makeup; women always put on too much makeup when someone dies. Fat petted the dead girl’s cat, Chairman Mao. He remembered the few days Gloria had spent with him upon her futile trip to his house for the Nembutal which he did not have. She greeted the disclosure of his lie with aplomb, even a neutrality. When you are going to die you do not care about small things.

  “I took them,” Fat had told her, lie upon lie.

  They decided to drive to the beach, the great ocean beach of the Point Reyes Peninsula. In Gloria’s VW, with Gloria driving (it never entered his mind that she might, on impulse, wipe out him, herself and the car) and, an hour later, sat together on the sand smoking dope.

  What Fat wanted to know most of all was why she intended to kill herself.

  Gloria had on many-times-washed-jeans and a T-shirt with Mick Jagger’s leering face across the front of it. Because the sand felt nice she took off her shoes. Fat noticed that she had pink-painted toe-nails and that they were perfectly pedicured. To himself he thought, she died as she lived.

  “They stole my bank account,” Gloria said.

  After a time he realized, from her measured, lucidly stated narration, that no “they” existed. Gloria unfolded a panorama of total and relentless madness, lapidary in construction. She had filled in all the details with tools as precise as dental tools. No vacuum existed anywhere in her account. He could find no error, except of course for the premise, which was that everyone hated her, was out to get her, and she was worthless in every respect. As she talked she began to disappear. He watched her go; it was amazing. Gloria, in her measured way, talked herself out of existence word by word. It was rationality at the service of—well, he thought, at the service of nonbeing. Her mind had become one great, expert eraser. All that really remained now was her husk; which is to say, her uninhabited corpse.

  She is dead now, he realized that day on the beach.

  After they had smoked up all their dope, they walked along and commented on seaweed and the height of waves. Seagulls croaked by overhead, sailing themselves like Frisbees. A few people sat or walked here and there, but mostly the beach was deserted. Signs warned of undertow. Fat, for the life of him, could not figure out why Gloria didn’t simply walk out into the surf. He simply could not get into her head. All she could think of was the Nembutal she still needed, or imagined she needed.

  “My favorite Dead album is Workingman’s Dead,” Gloria said at one point. “But I don’t think they should advocate taking cocaine. A lot of kids listen to rock.”

  “They don’t advocate it. The song’s just about someone taking it. And it killed him, indirectly; he smashed up his train.”

  “But that’s why I started on drugs,” Gloria said.

  “Because of the Grateful Dead?”

  “Because,” Gloria said, “everyone wanted me to do it. I’m tired of doing what other people want me to do.”

  “Don’t kill yourself,” Fat said. “Move in with me. I’m all alone. I really like you. Try it for a while, at least. We’ll move your stuff up, me and my friends. There’s lots of things we can do, like go places, like to the beach today. Isn’t it nice here?”

  To that, Gloria said nothing.

  “It would really make me feel terrible,” Fat said. “For the rest of my life, if you did away with yourself.” Thereby, as he later realized, he presented her with all the wrong reasons for living. She would be doing it as a favor to others. He could not have found a worse reason to give had he looked for years. Better to back the VW over her. This is why suicide hotlines are not manned by nitwits; Fat learned this later in Vancouver, when, suicidal himself, he phoned the British Columbia Crisis Center and got expert advice. There was no correlation between this and what he told Gloria on the beach that day.

  Pausing to rub a small stone loose from her foot, Gloria said, “I’d like to stay overnight at your place tonight.”

  Hearing this, Fat experienced involuntary visions of sex.

  “Far out,” he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. He did so now, deluded by his own carnality into imagining that he had saved hi
s friend’s life. His judgment, which wasn’t worth much anyhow, dropped to a new nadir of acuity. The existence of a good person hung in the balance, hung in a balance which Fat held, and all he could think of now was the prospect of scoring. “I can dig it,” he prattled away as they walked. “Out of sight.”

  A few days later she was dead. They spent that night together, sleeping fully dressed; they did not make love; the next afternoon Gloria drove off, ostensibly to get her stuff from her parents’ house in Modesto. He never saw her again. For several days he waited for her to show up and then one night the phone rang and it was her ex-husband Bob.

  “Where are you right now?” Bob asked.

  The question bewildered him; he was at home, where his phone was, in the kitchen. Bob sounded calm. “I’m here,” Fat said.

  “Gloria killed herself today,” Bob said.

  I have a photo of Gloria holding Chairman Mao in her arms; Gloria is kneeling and smiling and her eyes shine. Chairman Mao is trying to get down. To their left, part of a Christmas tree can be seen. On the back, Mrs. Knudson has written in tidy letters:

  How we made her feel gratitude for our love.

  I’ve never been able to fathom whether Mrs. Knudson wrote that after Gloria’s death or before. The Knudsons mailed me the photo a month—mailed Horselover Fat the photo a month—after Gloria’s funeral. Fat had written asking for a photo of her. Initially he had asked Bob, who replied in a savage tone, “What do you want a picture of Gloria for?” To which Fat could give no answer. When Fat got me started writing this, he asked me why I thought Bob Langley got so mad at this request. I don’t know. I don’t care. Maybe Bob knew that Gloria and Fat had spent a night together and he was jealous. Fat used to say Bob Langley was a schizoid; he claimed that Bob himself told him that. A schizoid lacks proper affect to go with his thinking; he’s got what’s called “flattening of affect.” A schizoid would see no reason not to tell you that about himself. On the other hand, Bob bent down after the graveside service and put a rose on Gloria’s coffin. That was about when Fat had gone crawling off to the VW. Which reaction is more appropriate? Fat weeping in the parked car by himself, or the ex-husband bending down with the rose, saying nothing, showing nothing, but doing something . . . Fat contributed nothing to the funeral except a bundle of flowers which he had belatedly bought on the trip down to Modesto. He had given them to Mrs. Knudson, who remarked that they were lovely. Bob had picked them out.

  After the funeral, at the fancy restaurant where the waitress had moved the three of them out of view, Fat asked Bob what Gloria had been doing at Synanon, since she was supposed to be getting her possessions together and driving back up to Marin County to live with him—he had thought.

  “Carmina talked her into going to Synanon,” Bob said. That was Mrs. Knudson. “Because of her history of drug involvement.”

  Timothy, the friend Fat didn’t know, said, “They sure didn’t help her very much.”

  What had happened was that Gloria walked in the front door of Synanon and they had gamed her right off. Someone, on purpose, had walked past her as she sat waiting to be interviewed and had remarked on how ugly she was. The next person to parade past her informed her that her hair looked like something a rat slept in. Gloria had always been sensitive about her curly hair. She wished it was long like all the other hair in the world. What the third Synanon member would have said was moot, because by then Gloria had gone upstairs to the tenth floor.

  “Is that how Synanon works?” Fat asked.

  Bob said, “It’s a technique to break down the personality. It’s a fascist therapy that makes the person totally outer-directed and dependent on the group. Then they can build up a new personality that isn’t drug-oriented.”

  “Didn’t they realize she was suicidal?” Timothy asked.

  “Of course,” Bob said. “She phoned in and talked to them; they knew her name and why she was there.”

  “Did you talk to them after her death?” Fat asked.

  Bob said, “I phoned them up and asked to talk to someone high up and told him they had killed my wife, and the man said that they wanted me to come down there and teach them how to handle suicidal people. He was super upset. I felt sorry for him.”

  At that, hearing that, Fat decided that Bob himself was not right in the head. Bob felt sorry for Synanon. Bob was all fucked up. Everyone was fucked up, including Carmina Knudson. There wasn’t a sane person left in Northern California. It was time to move somewhere else. He sat eating his salad and wondering where he could go. Out of the country. Flee to Canada, like the draft protesters. He personally knew ten guys who had slipped across into Canada rather than fight in Vietnam. Probably in Vancouver he would run into half a dozen people he knew. Vancouver was supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Like San Francisco, it was a major port. He could start life all over and forget the past.

  It entered his head as he sat fooling with his salad that when Bob phoned he hadn’t said, “Gloria killed herself” but rather, “Gloria killed herself today,” as if it had been inevitable that she would do it one day or another. Perhaps this had done it, this assumption. Gloria had been timed, as if she were taking a math test. Who really was the insane one? Gloria or himself (probably himself ) or her ex-husband or all of them, the Bay Area, not insane in the loose sense of the term but in the strict technical sense? Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.

  I wish I could have helped him.

  Chapter Two

  from VALIS

  Although there was nothing I could do to help Horselover Fat, he did escape death. The first thing that came along to save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old high school girl living down the street from him and the second was God. Of the two of them the girl did better.

  I’m not sure God did anything at all for him; in fact in some ways God made him sicker. This was a subject on which Fat and I could not agree. Fat was certain that God had healed him completely. That is not possible. There is a line in the I Ching reading, “Always ill but never dies.” That fits my friend.

  Stephanie entered Fat’s life as a dope dealer. After Gloria’s death he did so much dope that he had to buy from every source available to him. Buying dope from high school kids is not a smart move. It has nothing to do with dope itself but with the law and morality. Once you begin to buy dope from kids you are a marked man. I’m sure it’s obvious why. But the thing I knew—which the authorities did not—is this: Horselover Fat really wasn’t interested in the dope that Stephanie had for sale. She dealt hash and grass but never uppers. She did not approve of uppers. Stephanie never sold anything she did not approve of. She never sold psychedelics no matter what pressure was put on her. Now and then she sold cocaine. Nobody could quite figure out her reasoning, but it was a form of reasoning. In the normal sense, Stephanie did not think at all. But she did arrive at decisions, and once she arrived at them no one could budge her. Fat liked her.

  There lay the gist of it; he liked her and not the dope, but to maintain a relationship with her he had to be a buyer, which meant he had to do hash. For Stephanie, hash was the beginning and end of life—life worth living, anyhow.

  If God came in a poor second, at least he wasn’t doing anything illegal, as Stephanie was. Fat was convinced that Stephanie would wind up in jail; he expected her to be arrested any day. All Fat’s friends expected him to be arrested any day. We worried about that and about his slow decline into depression and psychosis and isolation. Fat worried about Stephanie. Stephanie worried about the price of hash. More so, she worried about the price of cocaine. We used to imagine her suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and exclaiming, “Coke has gone up to a hundred dollars a gram!” She worried about the price of dope the way normal women wo
rry about the price of coffee.

  We used to argue that Stephanie could not have existed before the sixties. Dope had brought her into being, summoned her out of the very ground. She was a coefficient of dope, part of an equation. And yet it was through her that Fat made his way eventually to God. Not through her dope; it has nothing to do with dope. There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by the unscrupulous. The means by which Stephanie brought Horselover Fat to God was by means of a little clay pot which she threw on her kickwheel, a kickwheel which Fat had helped pay for, as a present on her eighteenth birthday. When he fled to Canada he took the pot with him, wrapped up in shorts, socks and shirts, in his single suitcase.

  It looked like an ordinary pot: squat and light brown, with a small amount of blue glaze as trim. Stephanie was not an expert potter. This pot was one of the first she threw, at least outside of her ceramics class in high school. Naturally, one of her first pots would go to Fat. She and he had a close relationship. When he’d get upset, Stephanie would quiet him down by supercharging him with her hashpipe. The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn’t say. In Horselover Fat’s case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late. You can’t hold Stephanie responsible for that; she threw the pot, glazed it and fired it as soon as she had the kickwheel. She did her best to help her friend Fat, who, like Gloria before him, was beginning to die. She helped her friend the way Fat had tried to help his friend, only Stephanie did a better job. But that was the difference between her and Fat. In a crisis she knew what to do. Fat did not. Therefore Fat is alive today and Gloria is not. Fat had a better friend than Gloria had had. Perhaps he would have wanted it the other way around but the option was not his. We do not serve up people to ourselves; the universe does. The universe makes certain decisions and on the basis of these decisions some people live and some people die. This is a harsh law. But every creature yields to it out of necessity. Fat got God, and Gloria Knudson got death. It is unfair and Fat would be the first person to say so. Give him credit for that.