What If Our World is Their Heaven

by Gwen Lee

DICK: Yeah, something like that. They’re also going to release a comic book. It was really funny, my agent called me up and he said, “Hey, Phil, I can get you 10 percent of the gross on the comic book version of your book.” I says, “The comic book version?” I says, “listen, if I’m going to be cut in on ten percent of the comic book version of my book, which I regard as a very serious novel,”—I mean it deals with the problem of the sacredness of life, you know, and the value of life and everything,”—so I said, “If I’m going to get ten percent of the comic book rights, I must have one hundred percent of the suppository rights.” And then everybody got the impression that I was really angry and there was—there was a long period, there were rather hardball negotiations on this, but it all worked out fine: the novel will be reissued as it was originally written with logo tie-in—it will say “Blade Runner” on it and will have a picture of Harrison Ford, presumably, on the cover. Have you seen—I have a copy. I mean, I have a sample. Have you seen it?

  LEE: No, I haven’t.

  DICK: I have one right here. They sent me some material that—

  LEE: Are you pleased with Harrison Ford, is he doing a good job?

  DICK: Oh, he’s fabulous. He is absolutely incredible. There is the proposed cover, it may differ somewhat—there may be some differences. That’s, in other words, probably the only difference will be in the style of lettering for “Blade Runner” itself. They haven’t finalized on the type style yet, you know the way the letters look. Here are a couple of scenes. It opens up that’ll give you an idea. There are scenes from the film. Those are the punk rockers.

  LEE: I could have brought you a few.

  DICK: Hum?

  LEE: I could have brought you a few of those. We’ve got a few of those down there in Carlsbad. It’s strange.

  DICK: I know some punk rockers.

  LEE: Amazing. Willie’s new thing is K rock—KROQ.

  DICK: That’s what I listen to. That’s my station. Yeah. Yeah, I have my radios—all my receivers are set to KROQ— “The Rock” they call it.

  LEE: I tried to call them yesterday and tell them, I was really for them, and tell them I was a registered voter and I was twenty-nine years old and I was sticking up for the fact that—they are going to be picketed Thursday and Friday for playing “Johnny, Are You Queer?”

  DICK: Oh, I love that.

  LEE: Isn’t that adorable? I just love that.

  DICK: Yeah.

  LEE: The moral majority is—

  DICK: Is that the Go-Gos?

  LEE: Pardon me?

  DICK: Is that the Go-Gos?

  LEE: I don’t think that’s the Go-Gos, I forget who that is. We have the Go-Gos albums, I don’t believe it’s on there.

  DICK: OK, OK. I like that, I think it’s pretty good.

  LEE: Yeah, I was trying to but I couldn’t get through to them—

  DICK: Now, see, there that’s one of Sid Meed’s designs. Here is the first time—

  LEE: Wow. This is neat.

  DICK: Isn’t she great? Goddamn. Isn’t she terrific?

  LEE: That hair is—she’s got big hair.

  DICK: My goodness. Can you imagine what that cost? This is the main villain, that’s Rutger Hauer. That’s the actor, you know, he was in the Soldier of Orange and was it Nightwing [Nighthawks]?

  LEE: Uh, here’s Harrison and—

  DICK: There’s Harrison kissing Sean Young. And it’s the first, as far as I know, I could be wrong, but this I believe is the first time this still has been released. ’Cause Harrison has the right to veto—he gets to see any still of his that gets released and he can decide if he wants it released. And there he is kissing Sean Young. And he appears to be pulling down the venetian blinds in the bedroom for less light or else he’s— (he gets up and leaves the room)

  LEE: What are these people doing here, the little bubbles?

  DICK: (from other room) Those are lewd ladies rolling around in fishnet stockings.

  LEE: So there is a bit of sex.

  DICK: A bit of what?

  Lee: Sex, in your movie, then.

  DICK: I can’t hear ya.

  LEE: (louder) Oh, I said, there is some sex in this movie?

  DICK: I can’t hear you. (returns)

  LEE: Now I can hear you!

  DICK: OK. There won’t be as much sex as I would like to see because I just never weary of sex. I think sex is really wonderful.

  LEE: You do?

  DICK: I mean, I think that it was invented by the divine powers to propagate the species. But they are going for a PG rating so I don’t know. Sex is not an integral part of the plot, I mean, unless you lump love and sex absolutely together; I mean he does fall in love with Rachael Rosen in the end, the replicant. And I don’t blame him, because she sure looks cute, and jeepers, I know I would like to meet her. I’ve asked several times when I’ve been in touch with the production company. I have a—

  LEE: You never got to meet her, then? Jeez—

  DICK: No, really, you know, golly! (laughs) What is the whole point of my writing these damn novels and selling these damn books, you know, if they’re not going to introduce me to the leading lady? There’s a beautiful shot, there’s Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks. Now I swear, did you ever see Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks? He’s apparently doing pretty well.

  LEE: That’s great. Yeah. He’s holding them right.

  DICK: Yeah. So, he’s real good from what I can see. I like him, anyway, I liked Raiders of the Lost Ark. I really enjoyed it. That’s somebody else’s book, and we don’t read that because we don’t care what becomes of their silly books. And this is going to be one of their main shots. Will be that shot. And he is Rick Deckard. I mean, in other words he looks exactly I imagined the character Rick Deckard will look like. And what they’ve done, I hope it’s OK to say this— in terms of what the company wants to be released and said, but they are retaining a lot of the elements of the great detectives of the forties. Uh, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. I mean, as you can see, he’ll be wearing the kind of trenchcoat and the oxfords, you know, and the kind of, well, it looks like a double knit or something pants, but, like, men’s, he’s got a tie on, and, uh, in a way he could be dressed for like the ’40s. Uh—

  LEE: The hair, and all.

  DICK: Yeah, right.

  LEE: It’s got now the punk, too, short hair—

  DICK: Yeah, they will be definitely be drawing on the Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade archetype, which is essentially an archetype.

  LEE: Well, he’s got that strong, rugged look. He’s not your pretty boy, which is a nice change, too. I really enjoy that.

  DICK: Yeah.

  LEE: It’s a more believable character.

  DICK: Well, you know, they had another actor originally that they were going to use. I won’t tell you who he is, because I don’t know if that’s supposed to be said or not. I mean, I may be being a little more cautious than I should be, you know, but they did tell me not to shoot my mouth off when I’m interviewed and tell everything in the world, like how the film comes out, you know, all that, how the special effects were achieved, you know. But they had another actor who is, I think, one of the greatest actors in films. They decided they’d rather have Harrison Ford than him. And that was before Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out, so it didn’t have anything to do with the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. They felt that Harrison Ford was more this Rick Deckard. And from where I can see it, he really is. I mean, he is so much like him that friends of mine who have read the novel who are very familiar with the novel have come in and, you know, I have these prints up on the wall, you know, these stills from the film, and they just stare at the shots of Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford, and they just say, My God, I mean, it’s—And when I saw the ones of the girl, Rachael Rosen, I said, you know, if you had laid out 100 different women’s photographs, photographs of 100 different women, I could have picked her out of the hundred, she looks so much like Rachael Rosen did when I created the character. I m
ean, that—

  LEE: So when you create a character you have a definite idea of the person?

  DICK: Yeah, I have a visual image.

  LEE: They’re real to you.

  DICK: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, to me, Rachael Rosen is absolutely a real person. And all of a sudden I found myself looking at a photograph of the very character that I created in 1968—or, it was ’67 when I wrote the book, ’68 when it was published.

  LEE: OK, that was a while ago. Did you base, or have you ever based, these on people that you knew or was it more or less a composite of different people that you experienced or a fantasy person that you would like to meet?

  DICK: Well, uh, I have a tendency to write about the same kind of woman over and over again, which is a real beautiful, cruel woman, la belle dame sans merci, you know. That’s—she is cold, very intelligent, very beautiful, just utterly heartless. And, the protagonist always falls in love with her and then she just destroys him in some hideous way that, you know, some unspeakable way, because she’s so intelligent that she can outthink him, you know. It was pointed out to me one time by one of my therapists that, uh, he said, “Golly Jeepers,” he said, “I count eight of these women in your actual life,” he said, doing a biographical workup on me. He said, “Good Lord, I’ve counted eight of them, I’ve now got eight written down here that fit that pattern and so evidently—”

  LEE: Your analyst has read your books?

  DICK: Yeah, this one had. And he said, “I don’t know, you know, which is cause and which is effect. There seems to be a complete homogeneity between the women you fall in love with and this character, this woman you write about all the time.” And, uh, he says that the woman always shreds the protagonist up, and, he says, “These women always shred you up and then you go right out again and get shredded up once more,” and I says, “I’m sorry.” And he says, “Right. That’s why you’re here.” So evidently, you know, there’s some interaction between my actual life and my characters but what’s causing this effect I don’t know. I mean, I’ve actually read books of mine where I could not tell, literally could not tell, if the women were based on women I had known, or—what the sequence was. I mean, reading one book and there seemed to be a description of one of my wives in there and, uh, down to the length of hair, and verbal mannerisms and kinetic build, you know, body build, the type of body. And it went on and on and on and I thought, I certainly used an awful lot of that particular wife in this book and discovered that I’d written the book five years before I met her. Which is really scary. I mean, that’s super scary, because when I met her I didn’t remember, it’d been five years since I’d written the book and I had no longer remembered the book. So I didn’t make the connection, and then the book—it took a long time for the book to get published and when it finally got published and comes out and I read it and I think, golly, that’s a description of this particular woman, and then I discovered, looking through my files, I wrote the book before I met this particular woman. In fact, there was one, one book that I did that was just incredible. I do not understand this at all. Uh, I described this girl, I gave her age, her name, her hair color, her job, the name of her husband, and two months later I met—

  (tape ends)

  THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT

  Part 1

  January 10, 1982

  DICK: […] Now let’s see. What do you want to ask me? Oh—anymore about that topic or have we covered it pretty well?

  LEE: Um, I think we covered it. Well, yeah, we kind of got cut off there in the middle, but as you said you met a girl the same age—

  DICK: The same age, the same name. She had the same occupation.

  LEE: As in the book?

  DICK: As in the book I had written but had not even done the final draft on. I had written the book and put the manuscript away. And, uh, it was, the thing, was incredibly strange, that is simply unbelievable—it cannot be, but it is—is that in the novel, the woman appears to be doing something illegal and then finally we discover that she is a police informant. I met this girl, same name, same age, boyfriend the same name, and she appeared to be a drug dealer. And after I had known her for about a year—just pure accidental circumstances—uh, she had to admit to me that she was a police informant. That’s exactly what the girl in the book turns out to be, a police informant. Now I could have gone back to my own book and looked it up and found out that this girl was a police informant—if I just saw, you know, the parallel with the book, but I had forgotten. And only when I finally went to do the final draft did I notice that it was the same name, the boyfriend—in the book it’s a marriage, it’s the husband—has that name. But in real life it was the boyfriend. The boyfriend is the same name. And the age of the woman is the same. Details—and detail after detail is the same. In fact, I’ve even been—

  LEE: But there must be some term, you know, there’s precog—

  DICK: That’s the term, yeah—

  LEE: Remembering your—

  DICK: Precognition, yeah. That I’ve been accused of actually showing precognition. Uh, for instance, I had one book where I described, that I wrote in the ’60s— where it talks about, you know, Nixon being president of the United States and everything like that. Of course, there were ones where I was completely messed up, I even had the FBI and stuff like, I tried all the different combinations—but, uh, I do sometimes describe characters that I have yet to meet. And, I, you know, I now no longer tell whether the characters that I have written about are based on people I have known, or whether it works the other way, or how it works, but there is some connection, some essential connection between my characters and actual people. But I don’t really sit down and say—like, for instance, take you, you know—that I would put you in a novel. I might draw a characteristic from you, one characteristic from you and I might draw another characteristic from someone else. Now, if you read the book, then, you would identify the character as yourself, the other woman would identify that character as herself on the basis of that characteristic, you see. But characters in novels are composites. Now, the strangest thing of all, is my new book that’s coming out in the spring— and by the way, we are to regard this as an incredible coincidence—but last night, when I was talking to a friend of mine, I suddenly realized that I have four books coming out, within a month of the movie. And I thought, “Now that’s very interesting,” because—

  LEE: New books? This is not—

  DICK: Now, one is new, one is the novel on which the movie is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But they are also releasing two other books so there’ll be four books coming out between May and June at the time the movie comes out. Oddly enough, there’ll be four novels of mine coming out at that time. This one is the new one. Now, this one is a religious novel. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. (pause) I just spat on it. I spat on my galleys. (laughs) This is what comes of drinking coffee while holding—

  LEE: Am I going to look like a fool on the tape now?.

  DICK: By doing what?

  LEE: Timothy Archer, I’m not familiar with him.

  DICK: He’s made up.

  LEE: Oh, OK.

  DICK: Oh, no problem.

  LEE: Oh, OK, good. (laughs) I thought I was missing something there.

  DICK: No, no, no, no. He’s—OK, now, this is my new novel. Now, the character, the protagonist, is a young woman. She’s in her, uh, late twenties. Her name is Angel Archer. And the entire book is from her standpoint, seen through her mind. It’s first person. She is both a character in the book and a narrator of the book. Uh, in other words—this is galleys.

  LEE: I know, but it’s neat. I like it.

  DICK: Yeah, it is. It starts out this way: “Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn’t hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed. And I think I know why we are on this earth. It’s to find out that what you love the most will be taken away fro
m you, probably due to an error in high places, rather than by design.” OK, now, this is a woman, she’s in her twenties—I’m a man, and I’m in my fifties, OK. She’s graduated from the University of California—I did not. I went a month and was thrown out. Uh, she may even have a master’s degree; it’s a little vague but she, you know, evidently, you know, was a very good student. In the English department. I was never in the English department. I majored in philosophy. She’s—OK, now, here’s the strange part, now, this is impossible. Now, this cannot be. She’s smarter than I am. Now, the whole book is through her viewpoint; this is not just a character, the whole—every single thing that happens is seen through her viewpoint. She’s smarter than I am, she’s more rational than I am, she’s more educated than I am, and she has a broader vocabulary than I have, and she has—she’s acquainted with source material, books, that she’s read that I have not read. And yet everything is through her viewpoint.

  LEE: But now did you find this out as you wrote the novel, or before?

  DICK: Yes, as I wrote it.

  LEE: As you wrote it.

  DICK: Yeah. I just wanted to show it—I was forced to adopt this viewpoint, because I had—the book is about a very learned man, a bishop, Bishop Timothy Archer, it’s a very learned man, and in order to present him to the reader I had to have a viewpoint character who is smart enough to understand him. Well, now, that forced my hand right there. I had a very smart protagonist to see the Bishop through. Now, the Bishop is also very learned. The Bishop, he has a lot of education, he knows Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, you know, so she has to be very educated. Well, now, also, he’s complex, and she has to be very astute, so she had to be very rational. Well, pretty soon I wind up with a character that’s more rational. Now how can a person write about a character who’s smarter, more educated, and more rational than he, the author is? And has a better vocabulary. For instance, she—

  LEE: That’s what I’m asking you. Perhaps this is your special gift, here—