Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Viking cocked his head interrogatively.

  “You know what Dick’s response to that editorial argle-bargle was, my wolfish friend?”

  Attentively, Vike waited to hear.

  “He said, ‘That’s bullshit, guys.’ Then he told them, ‘Up your tender wazoos. Who needs you timid establishmentarians, anyway?’ Unfortunately, he was soon to find out that he apparently did. No one else would take The Doctor in High Dudgeon, either, and until Valis came out from Banshee a year or so back, Dick wasn’t able to publish anything at all—that wasn’t simply a reissue—for the next fourteen years. A crime. A shame and a crime.”

  And now the poor man’s dead, Cal thought. He fished around on a bookcase shelf, found his stash, and made himself a reefer. (It was one measure of his old-fashionedness, he knew, that he didn’t do coke. That was for Upwardly Mobiles, and he wasn’t a goddamn UpMo.) Smoking his marijuana cigarette, Viking tolerantly observing, Cal rummaged again through his forbidden Dickiana.

  He picked out and set down before Viking the binders containing Do Androids Dream of Ambitious Veeps?; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Now Wait for Last Year; They Scan Us Darkly, Don’t They?; No-Knock Nocturne; and four or five others, including Yubiq and The Dream Impeachment of Harper Mocton. Viking stared at the stack of binders for a long time. So did Cal, who remembered, as he did, the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of each photocopy.

  “Would you like to know how I got these, Vike?”

  “Sure,” the dog replied.

  “All right, listen. A friend of mine in Boulder, way back in ‘69, knew a guy who’d known Dick in Santa Venetia, California, and Dick had given this fella a Xerox of the typescript of The Doctor in High Dudgeon. Just given it to him. My friend made a copy from Dick’s friend’s copy and sent Dick a check for ten bucks through Dick’s friend… This too complicated for you, Vike?”

  “If you can tell it, no way it’s gonna be too hard for me to follow.”

  “Right. I’m sorry.” Cal took a deep drag. “We felt we had a moral obligation to pay any writer whose work we made keeper copies of. If we could afford to, that is. Lots of junk was going around that way before Nixon’s election—underground comics, poetry, posters, songs, etcetera. As if we were anticipating the crackdown to come. Not many student artists wanted pay for their stuff, but when you ran across somebody with a national reputation who was putting that reputation on the line to protest the coming fascism, the way Philip K. Dick was, well, you didn’t feel right keeping a copy of their work without giving something back. I mean, some of these people were professionals. Who counted for their livelihoods on writing or painting or performing, and when they couldn’t hawk their wares to establishment outlets, it hurt them.”

  “So Dick gave the typescript of High Dudgeon to his friend so the friend could show it around and make Dick some money?”

  “No, no, no! Damn it, Vike, you’re a prisoner of a bourgeois dog-eat-dog mentality. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Viking licked his chops, sheepishly.

  “It wasn’t what Dick wanted or expected. He’d given that novel to his friend simply to share it. It was what the friend’s friends expected of themselves when they made keeper copies. We wanted to show our gratitude by giving something back to the artists—in appreciation of their skill and courage and as a counterweight to the income they’d lost when mainstream corporations declined to sponsor them. And so my friend sent Dick ten bucks when he Xeroxed Dick’s friend’s typescript, and that’s why, hard up as I was at the time, I did the same thing when I made my keeper of High Dudgeon. I’d’ve felt like an utter shit if I hadn’t. You do understand me, don’t you, Vike?”

  “I guess so. But since the art I like best usually comes out of a can, I’m no authority on the subject, am I?” The husky put a paw on the binder holding Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. “Did you send Dick a check for all these other novels, too?”

  “If not right when I made my copy from the master, then later, when I had some cash. It would’ve been tacky not to’ve, and just look what I got in return.”

  Viking cocked his head at the binders on the rug.

  “Eleven masterpieces of American fiction,” Cal said. “Eleven unacknowledged masterpieces. Unacknowledged because unpublished by any establishment company. But I own copies of them, Vike, and that’s a high honor. It’s also a charge to resist the tyranny that kept these works from reaching print in the first place.”

  “How are you doing that, Cal? By working at a pet shop?”

  This unexpected question enraged Cal. “I’m not doing it, not at all, and, listen, I’m sick because I know I’m not!” He stubbed his spent roach in an ashtray and stood up.

  You fuckin’ dog, he thought. Why’re you questioning me when the only goddamn thing you do is dig holes in the fuckin’ yard and snooze for three quarters of every goddamn day?

  But Viking was relentlessly Socratic. “I know you’re not, Cal, and I don’t understand something. Why do you hinge your resistance to the Nixonian tyranny on these unpublished novels?”

  “I’m not following you, bung-sniffer.”

  “I mean, that’s bad. But you have a far more pressing motive, don’t you? A motive that hits closer to home?”

  Don’t you dare say it, Cal thought. Listen, you leg-lifting, flea-ridden, bung-sniffing growler, don’t say it.

  “What about your parents?” Viking persisted. “Isn’t what they had to suffer far more painful—to you, I mean—than King Richard’s career-trashing of a writer unrelated to you?”

  The word parents does it. Cal grabs Viking by the collar and yanks him out of the library, down the hall, and through the living room to the front door. Viking is happy to get outdoors again, probably because he believes that Cal is going to take him for a walk, but Cal has other plans. He hooks the cold chain to Vike’s collar and hurries back inside before the husky realizes that, instead of exercise, he has only another long stretch of tethered boredom ahead of him.

  ‘S what you get for being a goddamn busybody, Cal thinks. He returns to the library, sits down next to the open locker, amid his illegal Dickiana, and proceeds to mourn the man.

  In 1974, after meeting his contact in Snowy Falls, Colorado, a little town in the mountains above Walsenburg, and receiving from this guy a copy of They Scan Us Darkly, Don’t They?, Cal sent Dick a check for fifteen dollars—more than he could really afford. Two months later, he wrote Dick a letter about They Scan Us Darkly, entrusting it to the dude who’d been his contact. This fellow hand-delivered it to Dick in Fullerton, California, violating the Internal Travel Restrictions Act regulating all interstate movements. Two weeks later, the smuggler met Cal at a chop-suey joint in Manitou Springs and gave him a typewritten note from the author.

  Recalling how he fumbled open the note, Cal finds it taped to the inside cover of his photocopy of They Scan Us Darkly and frees it so that he can read it again. Nearly eight years old, it has not even yellowed, but Cal can smell the Chinese cooking odors—eggroll, sweet-and-sour pork—still clinging to it from that grimy café up in Manitou:

  Dear Mr. Pickford,

  Thank you for sending me your comments on They Scan Us Darkly, Don’t They? and on my work in general. I have reread your letter ten times and I say at last to myself, “I think you did it; I think you wrote what you set out to write. I can tell by what Cal Pickford says in this letter about your novel.”

  It took me five years to write They Scan Us Darkly, and as you so clearly realize, my heart and body and life are in it. That’s a lot to risk by putting it on paper; you hand the world your soul.

  Of course, the risk may seem less when no publisher will issue the book for general distribution, but really it isn’t. The risk lies in intervening in the wretched little lives that I try to mark in my unpublished books. It lies in trying to make a permanent record of their sad comings and goings. It lies in the writing.

  I would say more, or would write again saying more, b
ut I don’t want to put you at risk, too. Your response to my work and your financial support proves that you are a genuine human being. Too many of those with power over our lives today are artificial human beings.

  So I am cordially yours for a better day, later on, when people will understand.

  The name “Philip K. Dick” was typed at the bottom of this note, of course, but above the typing the man had penned “Phil” in an easy, forward-slanting cursive that warmed Cal’s heart.

  He returned the letter to its taped pocket on the inside of the spiral notebook. Then They Scan Us Darkly and all his other bound typescripts went back into the trunk, after which Cal dropped the lid, reaffixed the padlock, and put the cushion from the hall back on top of the trunk so that, if necessary, some weary, forlorn soul could sit down on it.

  Cal sat down, his hands dangling between his knees. Outside, Viking began to howl—a weird, lugubrious keening.

  That’s just how I feel, Cal thought. You’ve got it perfectly.

  He had to do something to mitigate his grief. If not mitigate, then articulate. He had tried to do it by talking to Viking, but Viking had hit him with that lousy non sequitur about his folks, ruining the effort. What, then? What should he do to speak his grief until Lia got home and he could take his wife into his arms as a buffer against the heartlessness of the world?

  A poem, Cal thought. An elegy. You should sit down and write an elegy for Philip K. Dick.

  This idea excited Cal. (On the porch, Viking was howling ever more pathetically.) He went to Lia’s desk and pulled a pad of yellow legal paper from the drawer. He took a pen from the drawer and arranged himself so that his elegy to Dick could flow out onto the long sheets as easily as tears from a grief-stricken child.

  Nothing happened.

  Cal waited, meanwhile assiduously thinking, but the poem would not come. Stirrings of inspiration came, but only stirrings, and Viking’s continuing howls did nothing to goad him to creativity. He shut them out by thinking again on Dick’s lovely note and all the unacknowledged masterpieces in the trunk.

  And at last he had a sound opening line and a good second line to go with it:

  Philip K. Dick is dead, alas.

  Let’s all queue up to kick God’s ass.

  But after recording these lines, Cal got stuck again and could find no way of proceeding. “It’s clear that in a world so crass,” he mused, testing the words aloud. And soon after: “The President deplored your sass.” They rhymed, these additions, but they didn’t get it. Cal would have deleted them, had he bothered to write them down, but he hadn’t bothered. They sucked. He knew they sucked.

  And so he decided that the two lines he had recorded—“Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. / Let’s all queue up to kick God’s ass”— perfectly encapsulated everything he wanted to say about the death of Phil Dick. They had rhythm, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration, and they spoke both his bereavement and his bitterness. What more could anyone ask? Cal stood up, holding the elegy, and declaimed it to the room in a voice as deep and melodious as the sea’s.

  On the porch, Viking howled.

  “Shut up, you bargain-basement wolf!” Cal shouted. “Goddamn it, shut your whinin’ trap!”

  But Viking did not shut up, and standing there in the middle of his and Lia’s library, Cal realized that tears were cascading down his cheeks, waterfalling helplessly from some inner source that he would never be able to pinpoint.

  7

  “YOU MEAN you’ve been home since one o’clock and you left poor Vike on the porch all afternoon?”

  “Philip K. Dick died, Lia. Mr. Kemmings let me off. He didn’t have to, but he did. He’s a pretty decent guy.”

  “Too bad his decency isn’t contagious.”

  “For God’s sake, Viking’s a husky. Leaving him on the porch a few hours isn’t like sticking him in the freezer.”

  “You’re stoned, aren’t you? Your eyes are glazed over, and you’re listing to the left. Ridiculously.”

  “It’d be even more ridiculous to list to the right. In this day and time, it’d be redundant.”

  “You promised me you’d lay off that stuff down here. This is a small town. Besides, pot makes you heavy-lidded and slow, and I’m not sure you need any help there. Worse, it made you indifferent to a fellow creature’s need for company.”

  Viking sat on the living-room rug, only a few feet away, taking in their argument and bemusedly thumping his tail. “A few tokes to soften the hammer blow of Phil Dick’s death—that’s all it was. And Vike’s fine. Look at him.”

  Lia knelt by the dog. Then, burying her face in his fur, she began to weep.

  “You poor baby,” she consoled the dog. “You poor, poor baby.”

  “Jesus. He’s got a so-so case of I-been-stuck-on-the-porch-for-a-few-hours blues while I’m the victim of genuine bereavement, and you’re cooing over him and cutting me dead.”

  Lia continued to cry and Vike to thump his tail on the rug.

  “Bad day at the office?” Cal put his hands into his pockets.

  Lia caught her breath and lifted her head. A new sob started to overtake her, but she mastered it by patting her chest. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Try me.”

  “Like I can’t believe, for that matter.”

  “Then we’re a pair. Bad days at the office for the empathetic Bonner-Pickfords.”

  “Cal, I’m sorry that your writer friend died.”

  “Thanks. I’m sorry about whatever happened to you today in the psychotherapy business.”

  “Are you sorry you left Viking on the porch?”

  “I am now. Maybe you’d’ve understood if you’d been here. The bung-sniffer was being obnoxious.”

  Vike’s ears erected. He growled the Growl.

  Lia went to Cal and embraced him. “Maybe I would’ve.”

  She and her husband held each other. The dog padded into the kitchen to push his empty yogurt bowl around.

  “Let’s shower,” Cal said. “Let’s get naked, literally and then emotionally. Show and tell. The latest fad in home psychotherapy, doctor.” Still holding his wife, he began to unbutton his shirt.

  “When did you give me this?” Lia asked. She touched the pin on her blazer, the pin with the intaglio side view of a fish.

  “Did I give you that?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I don’t remember giving it. Not exactly my style, is it? I’d be more likely to give you a hat or a pair of boots.”

  “So where did I get it?”

  Cal shook his head. “No idea. Nice, though. Very nice.” He nuzzled her ear. “Come on, Lia, let’s show and tell. Therapeutic ablutions for the blue and the world-battered.”

  Hot spray bludgeons them, and steam billows in the stall as if it were a gigantic coffee maker releasing aromatic vapor into the air. Bad metaphor, Lia thinks. But the steam puts her in mind of the coffee maker in her office, and of Kai’s obsessive talk about coffee, and—how can it fail to remind her of this?—of Kai’s own impossible vaporization from the lounger in which he was sitting. He turned to steam—or mist, or undulant spirit—right before her and Shawanda’s eyes, and so they vowed never to speak of this fact to anyone. Lovers and husbands excepted, of course, and Lia has just told Cal.

  “Dick,” Cal says.

  The word startles her. He stands at her back, his arms around her in the hot pelting spray, and the part of him that a romance novelist would call his “manhood” slides provocatively toward and then away from the cleft of her fanny. Almost as funny as erotic, it engorged at Cal’s first sight of her nakedness and grew tauter and tauter—nigh to bursting, like an overinflated balloon—with every touch; her back and bottom, and his belly and thighs, slide slide slide against each other in the lubricating downpour.

  Lia says, “I know what it is, but that’s not my favorite name for it. And I wonder why you can’t relax a few minutes.”

  “I can’t help this one upright part of me. Of course, there is a
sure-fire way to relax me. For a while, anyhow.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If I could help it, Lia, and if I were you—which would put us both in an embarrassing bind—I think I’d be insulted.”

  “You’re not thinking straight, hubby. An involuntary response like that isn’t a compliment—it’s a witless reflex. A gatefold in a magazine can prompt the same idiot snap to attention.”

  “Lia—”

  “And it hacks me off when you start using adolescent nicknames to talk about your penis. You sound like a schoolyard tough. A would-be schoolyard tough.”

  I really do hate that kind of crap, Lia thinks, enjoying the feel of Cal’s freshly shaven face on her nape. Men have more names for their goddamn penises than Eskimos have words for snow, and they seem to think that pulling out one of these nicknames—not to mention the eager dojiggy so dubbed—is going to act on us as an absolutely masterful turn-on. It’s enough to—

  “Lia—”

  “What, damn it!”

  “I meant Philip K. Dick, not angry ol’ Captain Standish here. Listen, don’t accuse me of talking punksterese. I wasn’t talking dirty, and if I had been, I’d’ve hit you with esoteric dirty. The member from Cockshire. Quimstake. Mister Pl—”

  Lia swivels around, pressing her breasts to Cal’s chest and opening her mouth on his throat. The member from Cockshire grazes her mossy pubes, and the water thundering down threatens to blind Cal’s cyclopean friend. She glances down to see it eyeing her and puts her mouth again to her husband’s mouth, letting her tongue go spelunking there as her fingers caress the rain-slickened rungs of his vertebrae.

  This is one way to make you shut up, she thinks. One foolproof method.

  After this kiss, Lia says, “What does the man with the priapic surname have to do with us, Cal? With anything that’s happened to us, me today?” The demanifestation of Mr. X from her office lounger seems—now—a fever-dream. All that is significantly real is Cal, her husband-lover.