The Search for Philip K. Dick

by Dick, Anne R.

  Although we still argued, I didn’t throw dishes anymore. Phil loved to make authoritative pronouncements, and sometimes he was completely wrong and I would tell him so instead of listening respectfully as females were supposed to do in the early sixties. In fact, everybody in our household argued and discussed various issues continually. Phil said all the girls should become lady lawyers. He was right. Phil was good at arguing, too. He was never at a loss for words. He could get angry. He was not the poor beaten-down little man that he portrays in his novels. But as I bustled around the house yanking the Electrolux vacuum cleaner along behind me (I hated vacuuming), I remember Phil saying, “I feel like that vacuum cleaner.”

  Then, changing the subject, he went on to tell me how people in Berkeley kept tarantulas as pets on strings and how wild tarantulas would jump six feet high out of the bushes on the University of California campus.

  Phil felt the children should take the consequences of their own actions, and when Hatte and Jayne fought, Phil told me, “Don’t interfere, let them work it out by themselves.” Phil was anxious about the girls’ futures and especially concerned that they speak proper English. He was worried that they were picking up poor phrasing and back-country colloquialisms that would be handicaps for them later on in their lives.

  On April 1, Phil came running in from the field with Hatte, Jayne, and Tandy close behind him. All of them were jabbering excitedly about the flying saucer that had just landed. I was almost convinced until I remembered that it was April Fool’s Day. Our third anniversary. That evening we celebrated with a roast beef dinner followed by a lemon meringue pie that Phil and the girls made.

  On another occasion, Tandy remembers Phil saying to the girls, “The Martians are landing. Come on,” and he grabbed the salt and pepper shakers and ran out the door as they trailed excitedly after him. I think their idea was that if you shake salt on a Martian, he becomes tame.

  He really got us all going about the meteorite, or whatever it was. We were sitting in the living room talking and suddenly Phil rose to his feet, his eyes dilated, and pointed over my shoulder out the window. “Something glowing landed over there in the field,” he said, excitedly. After much discussion we decided that it must have been a meteorite. We spent the whole next day searching for fragments and actually found some black glassy slivers, but I think they are indigenous to the area. After all, Black Mountain had once been a volcano.

  I could never tell whether Phil’s accounts were real or made up. The weirdest tales would often turn out to be true, and the most everyday, convincing account would turn out to be—well—a fabrication.

  In addition to telling about events that turned out not to have really happened, Phil was occasionally “gestalting” (he would say) some scene that didn’t exist. At night he would sometimes momentarily see a scene in the headlights of the car, like an animal that wasn’t there.

  Since Sputnik had been in orbit, we watched the sky hoping to see a satellite. Once we saw something wobbly going across the sky at twilight on the plane of the ecliptic. (This time I saw it, too.) Phil said it was a weather balloon. We became interested in studying the night skies and bought a book on stargazing. Soon we were lying nightly on our backs on a blanket out in the field, using a flashlight covered with red tissue paper and reading our new star map. We identified most of the constellations before we moved on to other things. We watched an eclipse of the sun through smoked glass that year, too.

  Phil didn’t believe in flying saucers. He thought the people who believed in them were kooks and lunatics. His idea was more fantastic and funnier. He thought that people were seeing some sort of gaseous, air-living creatures. “The movements that are described are more like the movements of living creatures than a ship from outer space,” he told us.

  On Hatte’s twelfth birthday, May 26, 1962, we cooked a picnic dinner at Phil’s cabin in Inverness for a group of girls including all ours. After dinner, Phil turned the lights low and read H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls.” The girls loved every horror-filled moment.

  Spring slipped into summer, and we planted fig trees, vegetables, and two hybrid tea roses that Phil fancied, Peace and Charlotte Armstrong. One day, Phil and I sat side by side on the edge of the patio each with an arm around the other’s shoulders. We didn’t speak. We were part of a moment of such perfection that it is with me still. Even after all that happened later on I still believed in this moment—for a very long time. As well as being my husband, Phil was my best friend.

  That summer, Phil’s old friends from University Radio days, Vince and Virginia Lusby, came to visit. Virginia remembers, “I was surprised to see Phil doing all those domestic things so happily. I remember him running out in the meadow to bring little Laura away from the sheep. Then he was helping the older girls out in the kitchen. I liked Phil so much better than when I had known him in Berkeley. Phil brought in a head of broccoli from the garden and showed it to us proudly—complaining how much more it cost to grow than to buy. He was the perfect country squire.”

  Frequently on sunny weekends we entertained either the Hudners, friends of Phil’s from Berkeley, or old friends of mine. The science fiction writer Poul Anderson came with his wife and daughter to play croquet. Phil’s ex-mistress, Janet Feinstein, came to spend a weekend at the Inverness cabin with her two daughters. The way Phil carried on in advance you’d think the Queen of Sheba was coming to visit. We got along fine, though. I felt so secure that this situation was no problem for me. Allen Ayle, an old friend of Phil’s, was deeply involved with yoga, and when he came to dinner he drank only a glass of water. Lois Mini brought over her ex-husband, Norman. When another old Berkeley friend, Alan Rich, came to visit, Phil showed him how to use the I Ching. When I interviewed him twenty years later, Alan remembered how impressed he was with what a happy family we were.

  During that summer Bill Christensen, the sheriff, conducted a campaign against the packs of dogs that were killing local ranchers’ sheep. We’d had problems with dogs and our sheep, too. At 4 a.m. we would hear the sheep running, and we’d tear out of the house in our pajamas, waving our arms and yelling to drive the dogs away. Phil bought a .22 rifle to protect our small flock—but he didn’t wait for dogs to chase our sheep. He would run outside and start shooting if a dog even walked by on the road. I was terrified he was going to shoot a child. He didn’t look or aim; he just shot. The gun lay on our bedroom closet shelf, loaded. I was really afraid of what might happen. I told Phil, “I’m going to get rid of that thing,” and gave it away. He didn’t say a word.

  Hatte remembers the late summer day two-year-old Laura picked all the tomatoes on the tomato plants. When Phil went out to reproach her, she looked up in the sky, raised her hand as if something up there had come and told her to pull those tomatoes off the vine. Phil told Hatte, “Look how early girls learn to lie.”

  Tandy went to Berkeley to stay with the Hudners for five days. She had a little tantrum the third day she was there and the Hudners packed her in their car and drove her back to Point Reyes Station. Phil and I were indignant that Tandy had been treated this way. This incident created a breach between our families.

  About this time, Phil’s mother, Dorothy, decided to move with her family to Mexico again. (The Hudners had lived there in the fifties.) Phil became desolate and angry that his mother would think of going to Mexico, “abandoning” him. I was amazed to hear him use the word abandoning when he claimed that he didn’t like his mother. Dorothy gave up her idea of moving to Mexico, but soon afterward she became ill, and Phil thought she might die. He told me that if his mother died, he wanted Joe to come and live with us. Dorothy, however, recovered.

  Phil’s Great-Aunt Lois’s husband died in early fall and I went down to San Jose, about seventy miles south of Point Reyes Station, to stay with her for a few days. Phil, alone in Point Reyes, became so nervous about the possibility of a grass fire—it was the time of the year that the grass was driest—that he made all the girls sleep ful
ly dressed so they’d be ready to run out of the house at a moment’s notice. There had been a grass fire earlier in the summer on the hill across the valley from our house.

  The next time we left to go on a small excursion, Phil unplugged all the electric cords. He told me he was afraid that rats might chew them and start a fire. Every time we took a trip after that, Phil would unplug all the electric cords. I thought this was odd and was impatient waiting for him. I’d never heard of anything like this happening, but he sounded so convincing.

  That fall, a rat did get in the walls of our house. I had read Ruth Stout’s new book about organic gardening and decided we should compost our garbage. We started burying it in a pit. Instead of making compost, we drew dozens of rats from the nearby dump. The rat who came to live in our wall was a busy fellow. One night, he stole all the cat food and hid it under the dishwasher. In one night he moved almost the entire contents of a ten-pound bag of cat food. We put out poison and the rat died—in the wall—and we began to smell a horrible stench. The stench prompted Phil and Pete Stevens to happily tear out the wall to remove the rat’s decaying body. They loved every moment of this loathsome job. Afterward, Joan Stevens came over and we made the new Italian dish pizza and daringly put artichoke hearts on it. Phil and Pete made frozen daiquiris to celebrate their brave deed.

  Then another rat chewed a hole in the laundry room wall. We put out poison, and it ate all the poison we put out and kept chewing bigger holes. We set a trap for it. It sprang the trap several times before it was finally caught. When we found it in the trap, it was very much alive. Phil tried to drown it in a laundry tub full of water. It kept swimming around dragging the trap with it. It simply would not drown. Phil fished it out, took it outside, and hit it with a hatchet, finally killing this almost immortal rat. Phil dug a hole to bury it in, started to fill the earth in over the rat’s body, paused for a moment, fished in his shirt for his St. Christopher medal, and dropped it in the hole on top of the rat.

  The Cuban missile crisis occurred in late October. We heard large groups of planes overhead all night long. We were frightened. What would we do in our glass house if nuclear bombs started dropping in San Francisco? We sat out on the patio and tried to figure out where to hide. We realized there wasn’t any place. We decided to walk downtown and buy a stock of groceries to try to survive. By the time we got to Harold’s Market we changed our minds. We ended up buying one carton of Pall Mall cigarettes to barter with should there be a holocaust. We had read that cigarettes serve as currency when civilization breaks down.

  Books continued to play a large part in our lives. I read The Lord of the Flies at Phil’s recommendation. Phil was reading Nabokov; he disliked Lolita. Dorothy sent books for the girls and we all read Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. Where did we get hold of that horrible illustrated book about teratomas? I think I brought it home from our neighbors’, the Hyneses’, library. There were pictures of cysts with fingers in them and some with bits of vertebrae. There was a horrible something that had once been a twin that remained as a cyst in the surviving twin. Phil was fascinated and used ideas from this book in Dr. Bloodmoney. At this time, he was also reading with much admiration Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and The White Negro. Then I brought home a book from the library that had a profound influence on Phil, Existential Psychiatry by Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist who had based his psychiatric theories on Heidegger’s phenomenology.

  Phil became overly involved with the case histories in this book, overly involved with Binswanger’s concept of the psychological realities: the world of the street, the aethereal world, the tomb world. He continually talked about the awful case histories, I can remember them still. They cast a morbid, somber atmosphere over our entire household. This book was a major influence on Martian Time-Slip, in which Phil put forth his ideas about the nature of schizophrenia.

  Binswanger’s book wasn’t at all good for Phil, although Martian TimeSlip is regarded by some critics as one of Phil’s best novels, one that married mainstream writing with science fiction. The anti-hero of Martian Time-Slip, Jack Bohlen, fights his tendency to slip into schizophrenia. He describes the onset of this disease in high school. Jack Bohlen remembers the morose, silent brooding mood that he fell into at a party; he felt paralyzed, his gaze fixed on a matchbook cover. (I would have told him, “Hey, you’re just having a low-blood-sugar attack.”) Jack is sure that something is wrong with him. He moves to Mars because of his schizophrenia and because of the crowding on Earth.

  In his twenties, Jack suffered a horrible psychotic episode. He saw people as robots, made up of cold wires and switches. He lost touch with time. Now, on Mars, he’s having these symptoms again but fighting them.

  He won’t be isolated like Manfred and end up mute and institutionalized. One of the ways he can fight schizophrenia is to have an extramarital affair.

  For him:

  … it is vital to maintain intimate contact at almost any cost….

  The first step in schizophrenia is isolation : the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter—the warm hearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with the endless ebb and flow of one’s self; the changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, of inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way. It is the stopping of time, the end of experience of anything new. Once a person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again. And he realized, “I stand on the threshold of that, a coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field.”

  Jack Bohlen describes the state he is trying to keep from slipping into as “monumental selfishness.”

  When I read Martian Time-Slip, I was disturbed by the little boy looking out of the window like Phil when he was a latchkey child in Washington, D.C., waiting for his mother to come home. Phil became quite cross with me when I continued to worry, probably a little obsessively, about that child, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Phil said, “You don’t have to worry about him. He was all right. He ran off with the Martian ‘Indians.’” At the end of Martian Time-Slip, Manfred ends up an old man on a life-support system after having had a stroke.

  Life on ramshackle, dreary Mars is humdrum, not like it was promised to the immigrants. Silvia Bohlen, Jack’s wife, is disturbed by the noise of children, the radio, and the fact that her husband is away from home so much. She takes Dexedrine to wake up and phenobarbital to go to sleep. (Was Phil doing this?) The neighbors have four little neglected girls, the ages of ours. Phil put in such everyday details as the teaching machine a door-to-door salesman tried to sell us, and the Sunday New York Times that we read. Where did Phil get the model for Arnie Kott, a brutal redneck union leader? Arnie had a brother named Phil who graduated from the University of California as a milk tester, the profession of our Point Reyes Station friend Jerry Kresy. In my previous husband’s small book, there was a poem, “Arnie,” about a friend of his who died. The portrait of my ex-father-in-law, Maury Handelsman, as Leo Bohlen, bringing corned beef and rye to Mars was a good one. Of course he would be preoccupied with looking for real estate, taking up options, looking for a deal. Our friend Alys Graveson was Anne Esterhazy; Phil mimicked her patterns of speech perfectly.

  Yet this somber novel didn’t cast a shadow over our everyday life, which went on merrily. When Christmas came we had a huge tree thickly covered with lights and ornaments. We had shopped for two months before Christmas, driving all over the Bay Area to get just the right presents and spending far too much money. We stayed up until 2 a.m. Christmas Eve wrapping the last presents. The children awakened at 5 a.m. to get their stockings. When we had the ceremony of the tree later that Christmas morning, a foot-deep layer of gifts covered half the living room floor. There were games to play and puzzles to work. Phil had bought a chemistry set
for Hatte and an antique electric train that circled the Christmas tree. Later we had a big Christmas dinner with a turkey stuffed with chestnut dressing at one end and oyster dressing at the other. I was exhausted, but Phil loved every minute of the day.

  “Just like Bob Cratchit and his family,” he said happily.

  Four

  DISASTER IN POINT REYES STATION

  …one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn’t hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, soon.

  —Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

  DURING WET WINTERS in coastal northern California, relentless heavy rain continues for weeks. In San Francisco, people have to stop their cars on the freeway until the downpour returns to being merely heavy rainfall and they can see to drive again. In West Marin, rains are sometimes accompanied by gale winds. On the point itself, hurricane gusts of up to 105 miles an hour frequently occur. It gets so windy near my house that it’s dangerous to take the garbage out to the garbage cans beside the road. They sit under a long row of cypress trees, and tree limbs can suddenly break off in the high winds.