The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  Arnie Kott, upon hearing that people with autism might be “precogs” who have access to the future, hires Jack Bohlen to build a device that can bridge different senses of narrative time and translate Manfred’s visions into a readable form in the present. Kott’s motivation is almost comically petty: he wants access to information about a blockbuster real estate deal involving a nearby Martian mountain range, the remote and barren F.D.R. Mountains. The denouement of that plot occurs when Bohlen has to break the news to Kott that (a) Manfred has drawn a detailed sketch of the decay of the massive AM-WEB housing project housed in the mountains (over a century in the future), and (b) his own father, Leo Bohlen, has already bought the land in question. Kott is an imperious man, and Bohlen is consumed with anxiety at the prospect of telling him that his experiment with time translation does not work (since Manfred is no use for giving insider-trading tips) and that the point of the enterprise is moot anyway.

  On the way to that denouement, however, the novel becomes seriously weird. The scene in which Bohlen breaks the news to Kott is narrated four times; the first three are out of sequence (that is, they are effectively a series of flash-forwards), and though each seems to be focalized through Manfred, and is announced by a paragraph that begins, “Inside Mr. Kott’s skin were dead bones, shiny and wet” (157, 167, 178), the three scenes are nevertheless narrated from different spatial perspectives (we follow a character out of the living room in one, but stay in the living room in another) and are marked by subtle differences from episode to episode. The first two episodes appear in chapter 10, but then chapter 11 opens with the third, as if chapter 10 is repeating itself; the subtle differences between the passages read like “glitches,” in the sense that gamers use the term—slight but deliberate deviations from the code.7 Two examples follow; the first compares passages from the second and third flash-forward episodes, and the second compares passages from all three:

  Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in an awful fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott was saying. “I’ll put this tape on.” (167)

  Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in a filthy fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self nearer and nearer to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth and fell on her. The dead bug words scampered off into the folds of her clothing, and some squeezed into her skin and entered her body. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott said. “I’ll put this tape on.” (177)

  Both seem to be narrated from Manfred’s perspective, mixing his idiosyncratic vision of his fellow creatures with ordinary dialogue. The second series of examples, however, introduces another level of complexity and perplexity. When Kott puts on the tape, it turns out not to be Mozart but one of his electronically coded messages to his confederates:

  A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. Mr. Kott shut off the tape transport. (157)

  A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. He shut off the tape transport. (167)

  A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from somewhere in the room, and after a time she realized that it was her; she was convulsed from within, all the corpse-things in her were heaving and crawling, struggling out into the light of the room. God, how could she stop them? They emerged from her pores and scuttled off, dropping from strands of gummy web onto the floor, to disappear into the cracks between the boards. (177–78)

  Again, the first two accounts of the “Mozart” tape seem to be focalized by way of Manfred; but the third is quite clearly focalized through the character of Doreen Anderton, who now seems to be overwhelmed by something very much like the “dead bug words” that had poured on her from Bohlen’s mouth. Time is not the only thing being warped here; the entire narrative fabric is twisting. Just as, in a later chapter, we are told that “Manfred Steiner’s presence had invaded the structure of the Public School, penetrated its deepest being” (194), thereby deranging all the android teachers in the school, here Steiner’s presence and perspective somehow “leak” into other characters. The result is that it is finally impossible to attribute these passages solely to Steiner. When, for instance, the confrontation with Kott is finally narrated in “real” time (that is, as an event following the other events of the day in proper temporal sequence) and Kott puts on the Mozart tape, we find that the character who likens the screeches to the convulsions of corpses is Kott himself:

  A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers. Noises like the convulsions of the dead, Arnie thought in horror. He ran to shut off the tape transport. (208; emphasis added)

  To whom, then, are we supposed to attribute the thought “noises like the convulsions of the dead” in the three previous versions of this passage? Who or what had access to Arnie’s simile, and how did Doreen Anderton, in the third repetition, manage to “realize” that the noises were coming from her?

  As for Bohlen, himself a recovered (or recovering?) schizophrenic, he finds himself increasingly incapacitated in the course of the evening; on one page he feels “the coming apart of every piece of his body” (211), and on the next the confrontation and the crisis have passed and he has no recollection of them: “the next thing he knew he was standing on a black, empty sidewalk” (212). In the following chapter, on the following day, Bohlen stops to reflect on what has happened to him and to the novel:

  He had sat, he realized, in Arnie Kott’s living room again and again, experiencing that evening before it arrived; and then, when at last it had taken place in actuality, he had bypassed it. The fundamental disturbance in time-sense, which Dr. Glaub believed was the basis for schizophrenia, was now harassing him. That evening at Arnie’s had taken place, and had existed for him . . . but out of sequence. (219–20)

  This is a fair enough summary of what we, as readers, have just experienced. So maybe Jack, rather than Manfred, is “responsible” for these out-of-joint and out-of-sequence time-slips. But this hypothesis doesn’t solve everything, because the perspective from which Jack Bohlen was a dead sack, teeming with “gubbish” and leering at Doreen Anderton, was clearly not Jack Bohlen’s. Manfred’s “autistic” rendering of events becomes the “schizophrenic” break in the text of the novel itself. What Dick has crafted in Martian Time-Slip—and it is no mean feat—is not merely the depiction of a character whose intellectual disability, like Benjy Compson’s, entails a radically different sense of time and narrative; it is also a textualization of that character’s intellectual disability such that the character’s sense of time and narrative so pervades and structures the novel that it can no longer be attributed to that character’s private stream of consciousness.

  The other characters’ response to the night of the time-slips makes this clear, inasmuch as we can say that anything about this extended episode can be made clear. It is not merely that Manfred warps Jack’s sense of time; Doreen also reports having her subjectivity invaded and altered. “I really couldn’t stand that child,” she tells Jack. “Last night was a nightmare—I kept feeling awful cold squishy tendrils drifting around the room and in my mind . . . intimations of filth and evil that didn’t seem to be either in me or outside me—just nearby” (221–22). Doreen is no doubt referring to the corpse-things heaving and crawling in her, but it turns out that even Arnie himself has felt the effects, underscoring Doreen’s sense that the phenomenon was neither inside her nor outside her (or, possibly, that her outside was in and her inside was out). In an extended conversation with his Bleekman servant Heliogabalus, in which Heliogabalus not only explains that Manfred’s thoughts “are as clear as plastic to me, and m
ine likewise to him” (226) (thereby revealing that Arnie’s plans for Jack’s translation device were needless) but also conveys the entire content of Manfred’s vision of AM-WEB (to which I will return), Arnie offers yet another theory of what happened on the night of the time-slips:

  “You know what I think?” Arnie said. “I think he does more than just see into time. I think he controls time.”

  The Bleekman’s eyes became opaque. He shrugged.

  “Doesn’t he?” Arnie persisted. “Listen, Heliogabalus, you black bastard, this kid fooled around with last night. I know it. He saw it in advance and he tried to tamper with it. Was he trying to make it not happen? He was trying to halt time.”

  “Perhaps,” Helio said. (227)

  Perhaps. And perhaps everything will make sense when the novel finally gives us Manfred’s perspective on the evening, since Manfred allegedly controls time. Or perhaps Manfred’s version will turn out to be shockingly, disappointingly ordinary, clearly marked as Manfred’s, with no traces of bug words or decaying women or strange temporal distortions:

  Seated on the carpet, snipping pictures from the magazines with his scissors and pasting them into new configurations, Manfred Steiner heard the noise and glanced up. He saw Mr. Kott hurry to the tape machine to shut it off. How blurred Mr. Kott became, Manfred noticed. It was hard to see him when he moved so swiftly; it was as if in some way he had managed to disappear from the room and then reappear in another spot. The boy felt frightened.

  The noise, too, frightened him. He looked to the couch where Mr. Bohlen sat, to see if he were upset. But Mr. Bohlen remained where he was with Doreen Anderton, interlinked with her in a fashion that made the boy cringe with concern. How could two people stand being so close? It was, to Manfred, as if their separate identities had flowed together, and the idea that such a muddling could be terrified him. (208–9)

  The various motifs of the time-slips are present, to be sure (the horrible noise of the tape machine, Jack’s closeness to Doreen), but it is as if the Manfred whose account we read here has no access to the consciousness of the Manfred who may or may not have been responsible for the awful cold squishy tendrils of subjectivity (conscious or unconscious) to which readers of—and characters in—Martian Time-Slip have just been subjected. This is just a frightened kid, apparently totally unaware that he is capable of warping everyone else’s sense of time and space. But then again, maybe Arnie Kott, or Doreen, or somebody knows something about Manfred that Manfred himself does not and cannot know?

  Yet even as Arnie tosses out his ambitious and plausible theory that Manfred controls time and “fooled around with last night” (I do love that phrase, and like to think of it applied to Benjy, who obviously fooled around with April 7, 1928), he sees in it nothing more than the potential to go back in time a couple of weeks and usurp Leo Bohlen’s claim to the F.D.R. Mountains. (He eventually does this with the help of Manfred and an ancient Bleekman, and I will get back to this, too.) The desire is all the more repugnant inasmuch as it persists even after Helio has explained to Arnie the nature of Manfred’s perception of time:

  “This boy experiences his own old age, his lying in a dilapidated state, decades from now, in an old persons’ home which is yet to be built here on Mars, a place of decay which he loathes beyond expression. In this future place he passes empty, weary years, bedridden—an object, not a person, kept alive through stupid legalities. When he tries to fix his eyes on the present, he almost at once is smitten by that dread vision of himself once again.”

  “Tell me about this old persons’ home,” Arnie said.

  “It is to be built soon,” Helio said. “Not for that purpose, but as a vast dormitory for immigrants to Mars.”

  “Yeah,” Arnie said, recognizing it. “In the F.D.R. range.”

  “The people arrive,” Helio said, “and settle, and live, and drive the wild Bleekmen from their last refuge. In turn, the Bleekmen put a curse on the land, sterile as it is. The Earth settlers fail; their buildings deteriorate year after year. Settlers return to Earth faster than they come here. At last this other use is made of the building: it becomes a home for the aged, for the poor, the senile and infirm.” (226–27)

  In other words, even after hearing all this—about the horror of Manfred’s vision, the final dispossession of the Bleekmen, and the fate of the aged, poor, senile, and infirm on Mars—Arnie can still think only, Yeah, yeah, and how can I get that land?

  You have probably intuited by now that there is not much to be gained in the critical observation that Arnie is a creep. But there is a more important structural point at stake here. Once one realizes that the time-slips are actually the key feature of the novel, and not just some weird textual juggling stunt that serves as a distraction from the main point (to put this another way, the novel is titled Martian Time-Slip, not Martian Blockbuster Land Deal), the entire novel starts to “leak” in the way Manfred’s (un)consciousness does on that night, backwards and forwards from that sequence. On the most obvious thematic level, the novel reveals that it is primarily about schizophrenia, mental illness, and intellectual disability—situated on Mars, sure, but a serious meditation on such matters nevertheless.8 Diagnoses and discussions of schizophrenia abound in the text; Jack tells an android teacher at the Public School (risibly named Kindly Dad) that schizophrenia is “the most mysterious malady in all medicine” and “it shows up in one out of every six people” (88), whereas his father, Leo, reports that he heard on TV that the figure is “one in every three” (133). During his visit to the Public School, Jack muses that autism is defined as “a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family” (73). At first autism is glossed as “oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over [a] sense of objective reality” (72); one page later we read that “it meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by society” (73); four pages after that, “true autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values” (77).

  These definitions are not mutually exclusive, but they are not identical to each other, either; and for my purposes, the most important thing about them is that there are so many of them. In Jack’s many ruminations on and memories of his own schizophrenic break, we learn that Jack is especially (over)invested in the business of diagnosis, convinced as he is that “schizophrenia . . . is one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced” (88), “the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man” (124–25). But he is not alone: the psychiatrist Dr. Glaub reflects, in the course of his attempts to diagnose Arnie Kott, that “often the first sign of the insidious growth of the schizophrenic process in a person was an inability to eat in public” (110). More alarmingly, he reminds himself that “generally, a concern with schizophrenia was a symptom of the person’s own inner struggle in that area” (110).

  At this point, possibly, the novel has produced a perfect feedback loop in which the ratio of schizophrenics to the general population is not 1:6 or 1:3 but 1:1.9 For every character in the book seems to have a concern with schizophrenia; even Heliogabalus, the Bleekman, has a theory. Declaring that “entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness” (97), he proceeds to offer Arnie an indigenous Martian version of the 1960s countercultural, anti-psychiatry position on mental illness:

  “Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.” (98)

  Jack, by co
ntrast, is horrified by thoughts like these: “And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death” (154). In his spells, Jack sees “through” people to the hidden cyborgs within, constructed of wire, plastic, and steel; Manfred sees a world of gubbish that degrades not only people and things but language itself, so that eventually the text itself becomes (in one of the time-slips) nothing more than “gubble, gubble gubble gubble, gubble!” (179). But the leakage does not stop here: once we understand the pervasiveness of schizophrenia and intellectual disability in the text, we can reread the novel’s opening sentence as a time-slip take on a form of American suburban ennui that was just percolating to the surface in 1964: “From the depths of phenobarbital slumber, Silvia Bohlen heard something that called” (1). She rouses herself at 9:30, long after her son and husband have gotten up, and decides, “I must not take any more of that”—phenobarbital, one assumes—“better to succumb to the schizophrenic process, join the rest of the world” (1). So now, as we reread the text as a text about intellectual disability, we come to understand that the schizophrenic process isolates one from the rest of the world, inducing an apathy toward public endeavor and an inability to live out the drives implanted in us by society—and that, paradoxically, everybody else is in the same boat.

  Leaving aside the pedestrian point that it was silly to imagine in 1964 that humans would have established colonies on Mars within thirty years (a minor point about Dick’s liberties with verisimilitude, I think, in a fictional landscape in which Mars has air, water, arable land, giant insects, and Bleekmen), time seems weird throughout the book. The possibility that “time flowed differently on Earth than Mars” is introduced very early in the novel, and attributed to “an article in a psychology journal” (5). I have already remarked that although Mars is the future (as Anne Esterhazy puts it), it is already crumbling; by the same token, Earth artifacts are spoken of as if they are inconceivably ancient. At one point Arnie tells Heliogabalus that he has “a long-playing record . . . so goddamn old and valuable that I don’t dare play it. . . . Glenn Gould playing. It’s forty years old; my family passed it down to me” (95). The Bleekmen confuse matters still further. Jack imagines—with good reason, it turns out—that Manfred would do better living with them (“possibly their sense of time is close to his” [150]), and toward the end of the novel, as Arnie prepares to go back in time to stake his claim to the F.D.R. Mountains, Heliogabalus informs him that he must go with Manfred to the Bleekmen’s sacred rock, Dirty Knobby, for even though “the rock alone is powerless,” Manfred’s presence will enable Arnie’s time travel because “time is weakest at that spot where Dirty Knobby lies” (236).