Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  And if you’ve really begun to think of Cal’s Rockies as home again—which you haven’t, not at all—then Thomas Wolfe was right: “You can’t go home again.” No, you can’t. Just try to reverse an exemption to the ITR Act already acted upon…

  Lia got up from her desk and went to the window overlooking the truncated main thoroughfare of Warm Springs. Hard to believe that President Roosevelt once visited this town on a regular basis. He came for the springs, of course, seeking relief from the pains of his paralysis. And today, not a half mile away, there’s the Little White House, his residence while he was here. You can pay a park ranger three dollars and tour the place, eyeing FDR’s photographs, cigarette holders, and cane collection. I did that as a little girl, when it didn’t cost so much, and in the summer there’d almost always be a crowd.

  That’s what I need today. A crowd. Tourists with neuroses and psychoses—a few problems to analyze and exorcize.

  Lia laughed. Nearly all tourism today was in-state stuff, small potatoes. A body would have to have real mental problems to try to get an ITR exemption—just to come from New England or the West Coast to visit FDR’s Little White House, even with planned side trips to West Point Lake and Callaway Gardens. Maybe if you were rich and powerful or if you knew people. Otherwise, forget it. You might as well plan a trip to the Censorinus crater on the next NASA t-ship flight. Your chances of vacationing out of state were about as good as your chances of cadging a spot on that ship to Von Braunville, the US moonbase.

  Lia returned to her desk, took a pack of playing cards from her drawer, and dealt herself a hand of solitaire.

  “Dr. Bonner,” Miss Bledsoe, Lia’s young black secretary, said, “you got somebody here to see you.”

  Lia scraped her fanned playing cards out of view. “You scared me, Shawanda. I thought you’d gone out for the mail.”

  “I been back awhile. You want to see this person?”

  “Who is it? Somebody who’s been here before?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t know who it is, rightly. He wants to talk to a doctor, though. That much he say.”

  “Does he know what kind of doctor I am, Shawanda?” Lia was being cautious because Shawanda would let just about anybody in who claimed to have business with Lia: office-supply salesmen, advance people for religious cults, and, twice, curious members of her own family.

  “He say he needs a ‘head doctor’, ma’am.”

  “Have you had him fill out the forms? I know we need clients, but maybe we don’t need to usher people in right off the street.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “ ‘Yes, ma’am, he’s filled out the forms’? Or just ‘Yes, ma’am, I agree with you’?”

  “He hasn’t touched no forms.”

  “Shawanda, why not?” Lia tried not to sound exasperated. She knew that she ought to call her secretary “Miss Bledsoe” rather than “Shawanda”, but the young woman—actually, an adolescent of eighteen or nineteen—had such a coltish look and such immature gestures and work habits that Lia couldn’t sustain the masquerade of formality.

  Besides, Shawanda sometimes spontaneously confided in her, and Lia had hired her not only because she could pay her only minimum wage—a necessity right now—but also because Shawanda was the grandchild of the woman who had been Lia’s parents’ cook from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Shawanda had been graduated from Harris County High School last June, and she was well versed in social science, math, and clarinet playing. Her spelling wanted improvement, and her command of English had a lot to do with her mood and her audience. Because the University of Georgia currently admitted blacks on a quota system, using the percentage of black Americans nationwide as its baseline figure, the girl could not go on to college. If Lia hadn’t offered her a secretarial job, she would have never found work that wasn’t domestic in nature.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I said why hasn’t this person filled out our forms?”

  “Dr. Bonner, I don’t think he can write.”

  Lia stood up. “Is this an adult person, Shawanda?” She feared that their would-be client was either a child or a poor black. Lia hoped not—not because she disdained to treat children or blacks, but because the visitor would have limited resources and she wasn’t going to be able to dispense charity forever.

  “This is most definitely a grown person, Dr. Bonner. This is, in fact, a grown man. A grown white man. With a beard.”

  “Does he look like a bum.”

  “He’s not sportin’ his Sunday best, but I don’t know if that means he’s a bum.”

  “And he can’t write?”

  “I don’t know. He won’t write, that’s for sure. He pushed the papers away and said, ‘Lemme see the doctor.’ ”

  Jesus, Lia thought. I ought to go to the door and take a peek at him, but even if he looks like the Penultimate Vagrant, reeking of the sidewalk and unwashed winter clothes, he could still be as rich as that crazy Howard Hughes. Dare I turn away Howard Hughes? For that matter, dare I turn away a guy with unresoled shoes? No. Not if I want to eat.

  “Send him in, Shawanda.”

  Shawanda—attractively lanky—went out to tell only the day’s second client that, yes, the doctor would see him.

  The man peeked playfully around the edge of the door, as if he might not have any greater wish to remain in Lia’s office than she had to meet with a bum who could not pay. This was reassuring. If he had doubts about her, then he was clearly not someone trying to mooch therapy just to be mooching therapy. He had standards. Lia had a glimmer of hope.

  “How do you do?” she said, seated again at her desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to know if you had a coffee maker.”

  “A coffee maker?”

  Her caller chuckled. “Yeah. One of those jobbies that you use filter paper with. Or even an old-fashioned percolator. But I see you’ve got a filter-paper outfit, the new-fangled sort.”

  Uh-oh. Maybe he only cadged free therapy from psychotherapists with acceptable coffee makers. Did hers pass?

  Lia pointed him to the lounger opposite her desk, a well-padded piece of art that she was buying on time. The man was casually but not sloppily dressed. He looked a few years past middle age. He had a high forehead, a fairly neat pepper-and-salt beard, and eyes either melancholy or menacingly hooded, depending on how the light struck them. Mostly, Lia decided, they were sad-seeming, with incongruous laugh lines at their corners and an equally incongruous mirthfulness etched around his slightly heavy mouth. How to get a handle on the guy?

  Seedily distinguished, Lia thought. That’s it. He’s seedily distinguished.

  “I’ll do the coffee,” he said, crossing to the table with the automatic coffee maker. “I see you’ve got all the ingredients right here. A pitcher of H2O, a bag of Brim—dear God, woman, the damn decaffeinated kind!—and a box of these filters.” He shook a filter at her. It reminded her of a wimple for an elfin nun. Pretty soon, the coffee maker—once Jeff’s, it needed a good vinegar rinse—was steaming away, making eerie puffing noises and dripping aromatic brown fluid into the Silex beaker.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said, sitting down in the lounger. The hollows under his eyes and his precise body movements suggested that he had once carried more weight than he did now. “You know, miss, decaffeinated coffee makes about as much sense as zero-proof Scotch.”

  “I like the taste. I don’t like the kick.”

  “I like the kick. I don’t like the taste. And if you applied the same logic to sex, you’d be just as well off doing sit-ups solo in front of a mirror.”

  Lia blinked. Who is this character? she wondered. He wasn’t your typical manic-depressive. And if he was manic-depressive, she had caught him on the upswing, spouting one-liners and baiting her with saturnine charm. An atypical manic-depressive.

  Composing herself, Lia said, “A couple of questions. What’s your name? And what can I help you with?”

  “To answer your first question. I
don’t know what my name is, and I’m not sure who I am.”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m having a keenly severe bout of amnesia—radical amnesia. Only this time it’s like I’m dead to the person that I ordinarily am. Or used to be.”

  My God, Lia thought. You hope for a customer and you get a guy who’s so messed up he scares you. Amnesia, he says, and you were waiting for somebody with a minor personality quirk.

  Lia shifted her weight. She could hear Cal telling her, “My lord, gal, you wouldn’t be happy in heaven.”

  Now the man was saying, “And so I dropped in on you, see? To get help. And to give it, by answering a prayer that you probably considered only a half-assed sort of wish.” He looked at the coffee maker. “Listen to that thing. Swear to God, it sounds like an emphysema victim.” He took a balled-up handkerchief from the pocket of his Members Only jacket and wiped his brow. “I love that stuff, coffee—real coffee. I have to have it. Making it, though, that can terrify me. All the goddamn gasping and steaming.”

  “It’s a borrowed coffee maker, that’s all. An old one. It’s certainly nothing to precipitate anxiety.”

  “Just coffee, huh? Listen, most reputable therapists know that almost anything can precipitate anxiety.”

  Beneath the desk, Lia closed her knees on her hands. “Forgive me. You’re right. But it’s just a coffee maker, and you’re safe here.” The question is, Am I safe here? You look respectable enough, even kindly, but your opening gambit—amnesia!— caught me off-guard. Any other doozies like that in your natty beard?

  Aloud, Lia told him, “If you really have amnesia, you need a thorough medical examination. There’s a hospital within a short drive of here.”

  “Doctor, you don’t pray—half-assedly wish— for a client and then try to shunt him off on somebody else when he shows up.”

  “I’m a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. You need to consult someone who’s had medical training. Amnesia often has a physical cause—usually, in fact.”

  “Mine doesn’t. Mine’s a mechanism for putting truly painful shit behind me and not having to deal with it.”

  “I appreciate your wanting me to take you on. You probably guessed by the swarms of folks in my waiting room that I’m just covered up with work. But I do adhere to certain standards.”

  The man in the lounger, his hands folded across his middle, simply stared at her. With amusement, Lia thought.

  “And if you know that your amnesia’s a mechanism for avoiding emotional pain,” she accused, “it’s probably not radical amnesia. You recall that much about your past persona.”

  “If it were total amnesia, Doctor, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be lying in the fetal position on some street corner.”

  “So you’ve come here, knowing that you’re subject to spells of amnesia, with exactly what in mind?”

  He laughed. “Thank you. You’re conceding that I’ve got one—a mind, that is—and I’m grateful.”

  “No praise, no blame,” Lia said, startling herself. Where had that gnomic utterance come from?

  “But what I had in mind was this, Doctor—answering your prayer and helping myself. You can help me do both by showing me the way to anamnesis.”

  “Anamnesis?” Curiouser and curiouser, Lia thought.

  “Literally, the loss of amnesia. Salvation through knowledge, or gnosis. You’ll recall, I hope, that Plato considered learning nothing more than a form of remembering.”

  “And you want me to help you remember your life so that you can learn who you are? Is that it?”

  “Half of it, I guess. The other half’s harder.”

  “Harder than curing you of amnesia? Or, in your terminology, leading you to anamnesis?”

  “Exactamente, señorita hermosa.”

  Perhaps I can help him, Lia reflected, taking her hands from between her knees and putting them on the blotter on her desk, as if to declare her sympathy for this odd person. Maybe I can. And I need to do just that if I’m going to call myself a psychologist and make a living at it. I can’t force him to go to the hospital if he doesn’t want to go, and it would be unethical to turn him away if he really wants me to treat him. But does he have any money? Is it bitchy of me to wonder if he can pay?

  Steeling herself, Lia said, “I hope you won’t think ill of me, but I need to know if you can afford therapy.”

  “I don’t think ill of you. Money’s a fact of life. It’s also a fact of death, I guess.”

  Lia waited. I haven’t offended him, she thought, but what am I to make of his aphoristic little reply?

  “Once,” he said, shifting on the lounger so that he could reach his hip pocket, “money was definitely a problem in my life. That I can’t forget. Today, though, I seem to be flush.”

  He tossed his wallet at Lia. It skidded across her blotter, bulging with notes of various denominations. She didn’t even have to pick it up to tell that her client—putting a possessive in front of “client” no longer seemed foolish—was more than “flush”: he was the nearest thing to Daddy Warbucks she’d ever bumped into. Still, it was demeaning to have a billfold tossed at you as if you were a dog waiting for a leftover pork chop.

  Then, picking up the wallet, she had an idea. “Wait a minute. Don’t you have some identification in here? A driver’s license? Credit cards? Something to induce, uh, anamnesis?”

  “No, miss. Only money. But go ahead and look.”

  Curiouser and curiouser is a total understatement, Lia told herself, finding that the wallet contained no plastic, no pictures, not even a library card. Only money.

  “Where did all this come from?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t filch it from the petty-cash fund at General Dynamics, though. I have this weird idea that it’s, well, karmic money; that it’s what I would’ve made in a perfect world if God or some other truly just observer had translated my spiritual struggles into—what?—coin of the realm, I guess. But it isn’t coins, is it? Just the quiet stuff.” He laughed.

  Lia put his billfold down and wiped her hands on her skirt. What’s happening here? What the hell is going on in my office this morning?

  “Well?” the man said.

  “Well what?”

  “Do you think there’s enough there to buy me a cup of coffee? Even if it’s castrated—decaffeinated, I mean—it seems to’ve dripped itself to drinkability.” He laughed again, a tight, almost maniacal chuckle.

  “There’s plenty,” Lia said. “I’ll be glad to take you on.”

  3

  “WHY NOT clean your last cage and treat yourself to an early lunch?” Mr. Kemmings said when Cal came back inside.

  It was already eleven-thirty. It took Cal about twenty minutes an aquarium, if he scrubbed it out good, bathed the “bears” in warm soap and water, and dried the varmints with a blow dryer. Thank God, they required this treatment just once a week. Still, today’s “early” lunch would net him only ten extra minutes. Sockdolager! Mr. Kemmings’s generosity was breathtaking.

  But Mr. K. knew what time it was. “Take a whole hour,” he said. “You deserve it. You handled that lady, Pickford. I fobbed her off on you, you know. There was something about her that made me afraid to wait on her. But you took her on and made a nice sale. A very nice sale.”

  “Yes, sir. And I thought I’d be lucky to sell her a couple of white mice.”

  “White mice?”

  “Sure. I had her sized up to take them home and eat them like My Main Squeeze.”

  Mr. Kemmings laughed. My Main Squeeze was the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium’s boa constrictor. It was gratifying to hear Mr. K. get out a genuine chuckle. He wasn’t a bad old geezer—just the kind of dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist that Cal himself, his Christian name aside, would never make. Protestant Work Ethic straight down the line, that was Mr. K. A fair day’s sweat for a fair day’s wage.

  “What made you jittery?” Cal asked. “Do you know who she is?”

  “I don’t know her name, but she seemed fam
iliar. I believe that’s what had me shook.”

  “She’s some kind of moneyed swell, Mr. Kemmings. You should’ve seen her car.” Silently, he added, To say nothing of the humongous goon who came in ahead of her.

  “Did you get a look at her auto tag?”

  “No, I was too—” Cal stopped. Hadn’t he put a ten-pound sack of cedar chips into the Caddie’s trunk? Of course. Slowly, then, it broke on his mind’s eye, an image of the woman’s license plate. “It was a federal tag,” he said, interpreting this vision. “Not a Georgia tag, but a tag with, uh, some kind of big-shot US government seal or emblem.” His own fear came back, intenser than before, raised exponentially by the fact that he and Mr. K. had found an empirical basis for their disease.

  “You think she was FBI?” Cal asked. “A Nixonian No-Knock?”

  “Agents don’t advertise. They’d be fools to label themselves.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the wife of some high muckamuck. Maybe somebody connected with Fort Benning down in Columbus. Even high muckamucks and their families have lives to live. Sometimes they probably go shopping like regular people. It isn’t necessarily a visit to get ourselves all lathered up over.”

  “It isn’t necessarily not that kind of visit, either. Why are we so damned spooked?”

  “Maybe she’s with some federal agency. Maybe she was making an undercover inspection—to see if we were meeting federal standards for psittacosis control or something.”

  “Mr. Kemmings, she didn’t even look at the parakeets. Or the macaws. Or any of the other birds. Her visit had nothing to do with psittacosis.”

  “Maybe it didn’t. If it was official, and if we flunked, we’ll hear about it, and there’s nothing we can do about it until we do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to feed My Main Squeeze. It’s been a couple of days since he last ate, and he’s moving around again.”

  Cal wondered how this sweet old guy could stomach watching the Pet Emporium’s boa constrictor take into its elongate craw the cute white mice that sustained it. It ate them alive, of course, and the paranoid anxiety that he and Mr. K. felt in the wake of their visitor’s leavetaking could hardly compare to the terror of the mice that Mr. K. put into Squeeze’s cage. Cal closed his eyes and clenched his fists.