Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “I wish you’d wait until my lunch break,” he said.

  “I guess I could,” Mr. K. acknowledged, “but whether you’re here or somewhere else, the same thing’ll happen.”

  Mr. Kemmings was already scooping the first of the serpent’s intended victims out of its cage, a pink-eyed little mouse with fur the color of a baby harp seal’s. Cal had a flash of his boss in caribou-leather boots and a hooded parka smashing a Louisville Slugger on the skull of one of these dewy-eyed seals. Meanwhile, its mother barked a protest, and gouts of blood from this and nearby bludgeonings incarnadined the ice. So vivid was this image that an arctic chill swept through the shop, scouring Cal’s bones and turning his knuckles white.

  Calm down, he thought. Today, Calvin, your every reaction is out of all proportion to its stimulus. He unballed his fists and tried to shake the tightness out of his fingers.

  Mr. Kemmings would never bash a harp seal. As a young man (Cal had learned from some of his boss’s off-hand reminiscences), Mr. K. had opened a small factory in Pine Mountain—this was at the end of World War II, in which a heart murmur had kept him from serving—producing argyle socks by hand and employing eight or twelve local people. The business had prospered until a man in Athens, Georgia, invented an automated process for making the stockings and Mr. K.‘s workers could not equal their competitor’s output. And so in 1956 or 1957 the factory in Pine Mountain had closed.

  “What I hated about that,” he told Cal, “wasn’t getting whipped by a fella smarter than me but having to let go all the good people who depended on me for jobs.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “They looked elsewhere. So did I. And finally landed a job administering some social programs here in Troup County—from ‘58 to ‘76—and that was what kept food on our table. I could’ve gone for thirty years and got an even bigger pension, but when Nixon won his third term, I opted for an early retirement from government work. Sheer luck gave me the Happy Puppy franchise when they built West Georgia Commons, but I’m glad I got it.”

  So you can feed baby harp seals—I mean, white mice—to My Main Squeeze, Cal thought. But he was being unfair. How could you get down on a man who worried so much about other people and who wore to the pet shop every day another pair of the argyle socks made in his long-defunct factory? They were poignantly out-of-style socks, but so lovingly wrought that a man could still wear them to work three decades after their manufacture.

  Now Mr. Kemmings was putting the mouse into My Main Squeeze’s glass prison. Cal started to return to the cavies, but his boss stopped him. Cal glanced sidelong at the rodent, which was already scurrying from side to side at one end of the cage. The boa lifted its big head, flicked its tongue, uncoiled the foremost foot of its eight-foot body, and loosened the hinge of its jaw so that it could engulf its bewhiskered lunch. In the boa’s simple movements was so much easy menace that Cal began imagining the situation from the mouse’s point of view. Fright to the second power. Terror cubed.

  “Jesus. I don’t know how you can do that, Mr. Kemmings.”

  “My Main Squeeze depends on me to do it. If I didn’t do it, he’d die.”

  “Couldn’t Squeeze get by on yogurt or field peas or something?”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Even canned dog food’d be better than this.”

  “For you, Pickford. Not for Squeeze.”

  Mr. K. was actually blocking Cal’s route to the back, and now the rodent, its little body aquiver from snout to tail tip, stood before the boa on three legs, one forepaw lifted and its flinty red eyes glittering like struck match heads. Squeeze, coolly swaying the forepart of its length, was hypnotizing Mickey. Either that or a built-in defense mechanism—an ancient crisis-activated kindness of the genes—was hypnotizing the mouse.

  Cal’s own fear was palpable now. “Mr. Kemmings—”

  “Why can’t we pity critters that crawl? We stigmatize them as evil. We allegorize them as satanic tools. Then we revile them for behaving as nature has made them behave.”

  “There’s no odor as sickening as snake, Mr. Kemmings.”

  “You can get used to a smell, Pickford.”

  “Maybe so. But put me in a monkey house any day. That’s a strong smell, but at least its mammalian.”

  “And that’s provincial prejudice speaking, not reason.”

  “I think my nostrils and my gut have more to do with it than my brain, Mr. Kemmings.”

  Cal was looking at the floor, the random lay of the tiles. He knew that My Main Squeeze had caught and engorged Mickey—the bumps on the glass had told him so—and he had no wish to see the serpent peristaltically mangle the mouse as it worked the paralyzed lump down its digestive tract.

  “Squeeze is only behaving according to plan. He needs fresh meat. Otherwise he gets puny, curls up, and dies. To hate an animal because it behaves as it’s been born to do is idiotic. You demean yourself as well as the object of your scorn. You have to transcend those kinds of feelings and develop empathy for natural behavior that you once saw as base or hateful. Squeeze doesn’t arbitrarily inflict hurt on the world. In some ways, he’s a model inmate of our mortal penitentiary. He moves only when hunger goads him to move. The remainder of the time he slumbers, doing no evil to anyone and dreaming about … well, who can say?”

  “And the mice that he murders when he’s awake?”

  “At least they’re put to good use. They die to make more life—that’s the only way to look at it.”

  “If you’re a fan of life squamous and snaky.”

  Mr. K. chuckled in spite of himself. “You’re an incorrigible snake hater, Pickford. I’ve talked your head off campaigning for them, and you’ve missed your early lunch. Go on now. You can get that final ‘bear’ cage after you’ve eaten. Take an hour.”

  But Cal refused, declaring that he’d enjoy his mouse sandwich—well, his Chick-Fil-A—a whole lot more if he finished what he’d started. That said, he went to do what he had to do, leaving Mr. K. to fish out another victim for My Main Squeeze and the boa to flick its tongue in benign anticipation of dessert.

  The pellet-littered and pee-soaked cedar chips had to go into a Dempsy Dumpster behind the pet store. Cal carried them out in an old chip sack, which he heaved up and over the side of the khaki-colored dumpster. Then he returned to peel the sodden sheets of newspaper off the glass floor of the aquarium: He hated peeling away the newspaper. The stench of urine was more concentrated in the paper than in the chips, and the newsprint almost always came off on his hands, marking him with blurred headlines and fractured photos of sports figures and politicians.

  But Cal bent to the task anyway, and as he was easing back the topmost layer of darkened newsprint, he realized that it bore upon it obituaries better than two weeks old. Death notices. The irony—the incongruity—of discovering death notices preserved in cavy pee gave him pause. Human beings exited the womb in the throes of their mothers’ birth pangs, struggled through infancy and childhood to become adults, and suffered how many daily indignities to define themselves as humane persons? And at the end, what? A funeral and oblivion. It seemed God’s final obscene raspberry to consign their obituary notices to the bottom of a cage for Brezhnev bears.

  On his knees, gripping the plastic cap around the edge of the aquarium, Cal peered down at the obituaries. What he had to do was simple: He had to read them. He would show these people who had died, suffering this final cosmic, not to say comic, indignity, that much honor. What had the Atlanta Constitution‘s obit reporter written about them? He might lose some of the extra half hour that Mr. K. had given him for lunch, but you made that sort of sacrifice for members of the species to which you belonged. Simple decency demanded it.

  So Cal, stooped forward over the reeking newsprint, read, and from each of the notices he learned the date of birth, educational and employment history, noteworthy accomplishments, and surviving relatives. A woman, twenty-eight, a ballerina, dead of bone cancer. A man, seventy-one, the reti
red vice president of a meat-packing firm, the victim of congestive heart failure. A seventeen-year-old boy, not yet out of high school, shot in the head at a fast-food place near 1-85 by “person or persons unknown”, who may have been shooting at random from a car speeding by on the overpass. Jesus.

  Cal lifted the sodden sheet, flipped it, and found an obituary on the other side that hit him like an open-handed slap:

  PHILIP K. DICK, NOTED AMERICAN WRITER,

  DIES AT 53 IN AFTERMATH OF DISABLING STROKE

  IN SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA

  Philip Kindred Dick, who suffered a stroke in Santa Ana, California, on Feb. 18, died yesterday at 8:10 A.M. in the Western Medical Center there. He was fifty-three.

  Dick forged a reputation as a significant post-War figure in American letters with an outpouring of highly original novels from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s.

  His first novel, “Voices from the Streets” in 1953, won little immediate approval, being disjointed and overlong, but the critic Orville Prescott nevertheless hailed it for its “unique sense of vision and stinging critique of middle-class American values.”

  Seven important books followed: “Mary and the Giant” (1956), “A Time for George Stavros” (1957), “Pilgrim on the Hill” (1957), “The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt” (1958), “Puttering About in a Small Land” (1958), and “In Milton Lumky Territory” (1959), which Time magazine praised as “the most devastating mimetic deconstruction of capitalism since Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman.’ ”

  Dick’s productivity declined during the 1960s. Some argued that he had burned himself out writing seven major novels in as many years.

  But in the eight years prior to Richard Nixon’s presidency, he still managed to release three noteworthy works: “Confessions of a Crap Artist” (1962), which many consider his finest novel; “The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike” (1963), combining oblique social comment with Dick’s idiosyncratic interest in paleoanthropology; and, strangest of all, “Nicholas and the Higs” (1967).

  Most of Dick’s bibliographers believe that “Nicholas and the Higs” was written in the late 1950s, set aside by the author as “unsalvageable”, and completely revised in the three years following John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

  This odd book was almost universally panned. One reviewer called it an “undisciplined prank” and “concrete proof” of Dick’s failing powers as a novelist. Others faulted Dick for attempting to out-Pynchon Pynchon (the apocalyptic American novelist Thomas Pynchon, best known at that time for “V”).

  Most objections to “Nicholas and the Higs”, in fact, stemmed from Dick’s quirky incorporation of fantasy or science-fictional elements into an otherwise naturalistic narrative…

  “Pickford, are you all right?” Cal heard this question as if from a great distance. But then he realized that Mr. K.—finding him peering into the bottom of a guinea-pig cage—must be thinking that he had pulled a muscle or suddenly become ill. Maybe his boss thought that he was going to throw up into the aquarium. Both numb and alarmed, Cal realized that this was a definite possibility.

  “Pickford!” Mr. K.‘s voice had skyed to a falsetto.

  “I’m okay,” Cal hastened to assure him. “Really, I’m okay.” But he made no move to stand up, fascinated by both the fact of Philip K. Dick’s obituary—the man had died nearly three weeks ago, without his learning of it until now—and its clinical summing up of Dick’s place in American letters. So Cal continued to stare at, and struggled to finish reading, the sodden death notice.

  “Can’t you move? Do you need me to get a paramedic?”

  “I’ve just found out that someone I love has died,” Cal said, tears spontaneously misting his vision.

  “Your mother? Your father?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that, Mr. Kemmings. I’m okay, really. Just give me a couple of minutes. Please.”

  … Successful work by Pynchon, Joseph Heller, James Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, may have prompted Dick’s own ventures into “literary surrealism”, but most critics agree that it was not his forte.

  After “Nicholas and the Higs”, Dick published no new book for fourteen years. In 1981, however, “Valis”, his last novel, appeared from Banshee Books, a small New York paperback house specializing in crime, martial arts, and science-fiction titles. Labeled science fiction, “Valis” strikes most partisans of Dick’s work as a sordid record of the total unraveling of his personality.

  This book has no literary merit at all,” wrote Luke Santini in a Harper’s magazine article entitled “A Crap Artist Craps Out” (Nov. 1981). “It may have value as a case history for students of psychiatry and abnormal human behavior, but as a work of art, it falls somewhere between subway graffiti and the fanatic propaganda of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.”

  Banshee Books earned intense industry criticism for publishing “Valis”. The firm received these criticisms for exploiting the past reputation of the author rather than for the garbled content of the novel itself.

  Then, charging a seditious libel of Pres. Nixon, the Board of Media Censorship in Washington, DC, formed during the chief executive’s first term, seized a second 60,000-copy printing of “Valis” before Banshee Books could distribute it…

  “Cal!” Mr. Kemmings cried, and seldom did he use anyone’s first name. “I can’t leave you doubled over like this, son.”

  “I’m okay, I’m okay. Just a couple more minutes.”

  Rumors have long circulated that Dick wrote at least twenty unpublished novels during his fourteen-year “silence”. Most reliable scholars discount these rumors, but some concede that Dick may have done two or three “absurdist”, “surrealist”, or “quasi-speculative” novels in the vein of “Nicholas and the Higs” and “Valis”.

  If so, they had literary or political shortcomings that kept them from print. Representatives of Dick’s major publisher—Hartford, Brice—claim that no one at their firm ever saw these rumored non-realist novels. In 1979, the company had rejected “Valis”.

  Wilhelm Pauls, a professor of Contemporary American Literature at California State University at Fullerton, calls Dick’s death “a tragedy for American letters.”

  “He wasn’t a Hemingway or a Faulkner,” Pauls says, “but he was still a first-rate, if oddballish, talent. I think you’d have to rank him with writers like Nathaniel West, John Purdy, and D. Keith Mano.

  “The truly tragic thing about Dick was those lost years between the ‘Higs’ book and that final schizo mess [‘Valis’] that any decent publisher would’ve let the poor man’s heirs bury with him. Had he stayed sane and kept working, he might’ve become the foremost American writer of the Nixon Era. Unhappily, he did neither.”

  Three children and five former wives survive Dick. The family intends to bury him in Fort Morgan, Colorado, next to a twin sister, Jane C. Dick, who died not long after their birth on Dec. 16, 1928.

  “Who, Pickford? Who in your family died? Are you finding this out from an old newspaper?”

  “I’m sorry. Not a family member. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Just leave the cage be, son. I’ll finish it.” The old man was pulling him up by the elbow. “I want you to take the day off, Pickford. Tomorrow, too. A person shouldn’t have to find out from an old newspaper that one of his loved ones has died.”

  “It’s Philip K. Dick,” Cal said. “The writer. He’s been dead nearly three weeks, and I didn’t know.”

  “That’s a shame. That’s cruel. They should’ve told you.”

  “But he’s not family. They couldn’t’ve known to tell me. He had thousands of admirers, Mr. Kemmings.” Cal was on his feet now, his hands gray with printer’s ink and his heart thudding.

  “Philip Craddock?”

  “Philip K. Dick, Mr. Kemmings. The writer.”

  “Never heard of him. I always liked Murray Spillane—tough-guy stuff. Just to pass the time with, though.”

  “Remember that movie
Confessions of a Crap Artist? With Jack Lemmon as Jack Isidore? Dick wrote the book they based it on.”

  “That’s old. Twenty years.”

  “Only fifteen. Anyway, you do know who Philip K. Dick is. You really do. That film won awards.”

  “I guess it did. And Mr. Dick was a friend of yours?”

  Cal felt dizzy. Maybe from standing up too fast, maybe from trying to comprehend the writer’s obituary before digesting the fact of his death. Back in Colorado, I’d’ve known a day or two after it happened. I had friends there who cared about such things and who would’ve told me. The man’s buried there. But down here, I’m isolated. No real friends yet. Nobody that I know into Dick’s stuff quite the way I am.

  “Take the afternoon, Cal. I won’t dock you. Go on.”

  “I will,” he said. “I think I’d better.” But over Mr. K.‘s heartfelt protests, he finished cleaning the aquarium and making its Brezhnev bears comfortable. Only then did he feel he could grab his windbreaker and exit the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium onto the main corridor of West Georgia Commons mall.

  Half a day’s sweat for a whole day’s wage, he thought. And I’m bereft. The death of a man I never met, an entire continent away, has bereaved me.

  And, God, how it hurts!

  4

  CAL’S WALK took him toward the Chick-Fil-A franchise, where the smells of french fries and chicken overpowered him. Ordinarily, he liked these smells. Today, they sickened him. That three-week-old obituary in the Constitution had stolen his hunger, and he wasn’t about to stand in line with the lunch-hour line breakers and elbow throwers to buy a sandwich that his grief for the late Phil Dick would probably prevent him from keeping down.

  Therefore, he angled away from the food counter to the other side of the corridor. Here he strolled against the prevailing flow of pedestrians until he was opposite the entrance to Gangway Books, where James T. Michener’s The Boers and Bishop Joshua Marlin’s Dead Sea, Living Faith had places of honor in a storefront display. He struggled to see who was at the register, found that Le Boi Loan held that post, and so cut back across the trickle of foot traffic to tell the slender Vietnamese his news.