Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Cal grips her by her upper arms. “I meant that your client today—this ‘Kai’ fella—and Philip K. Dick are one and the same. You were visited by the very person I’ve been grieving over.”

  Lia suddenly remembers. “He asked to see a picture of you. He said you were the reason he’d come to Warm Springs. That maybe you were … how did he put it? The gist was that you could help him overcome his problems. Amnesia, binocular perception—like that.”

  “Me?”

  “But I told him my family life was none of his business.”

  Lia sees that, even in the reddening spray, Cal’s face has gone pale. Her tale of Kai’s metamorphosis into see-through nothingness didn’t much perturb him, but letting him know that Kai thinks him the focus of a telling emanation … ah, that news has brought the reality of the whole irreal situation home to him.

  “Look. Your Captain Standish is at half mast.”

  “Don’t be flip. Something incredible has happened.”

  “I know that. And you’ve just told me that I was visited by a dead man. A ghost, I assume.” But no, not a ghost. Lia remembers what Shawanda said, that Kai must have appeared to them wearing a “resurrection body”. Otherwise, how could he’ve drunk coffee? And why would he’ve warned Shawanda not to touch him?

  “Phil Dick visited you, and he said I was the reason. You’ve got it all on tape, don’t you?”

  “Captain Standish has been demoted. You may have to start calling him Private Limpley.”

  “Lia!”

  “Cool it. My story didn’t hit home until you realized Kai had asked about you. Then your eyes light up and your rudder relaxes.”

  What egos men have. They can’t empathize with anybody unless that other person’s problem directly involves them, too. Abstract sympathy, long-distance compassion … sooner expect a piranha to ask the blessing before meals than a male human being to show such selfless kindness, ever. Another example of the me-first mentality that sent Viking to the porch.

  “Lia, I asked you if you had it all on tape.”

  “In my briefcase. Hearing what Kai—Philip K. Dick—had to say about King Richard, I wasn’t about to leave it at the office.”

  Dripping wet, Cal pushes aside the shower curtain, steps over the edge of the tub, and exits the bathroom bare-assed.

  “Cal!” Damn you, Lia thinks. You’ll get everything wet. She shuts off the spigots, gropes for a towel, and, finding one, dries her upper body and wraps it around herself toga-fashion.

  Cal returns, puts her cassette player on the sink stand, sits down on the pink commode-lid cover, and turns the player on.

  “You’re going to electrocute yourself. You probably sopped all my notes and reference material.”

  “They’re all right—I was very careful. And this thing runs on batteries. Just let me listen to it, okay?”

  “Let’s get dressed and eat something. You didn’t happen to fix us something during your long afternoon’s journey into the dinner hour, did you?”

  Fat chance, Lia decides. You’re obsessive today, a one-track engine chugging hell-for-smelter toward … what? A head-on crash with a self-annulling illogicality. You’re certainly not thinking about scrambling eggs or frying hamburgers.

  Waiting for the tape to play, Lia shivers more violently than the cool of the apartment would require. Because what you really fear, she admits, is the possibility that outside your office, it won’t play at all. If not, Cal will say you’ve flipped out. He’ll razz you about getting stoned on curried chicken in the Victorian Tea Room. You gave him a hard time for doing grass, but he hasn’t conjured from his tetrahydrocannabinol-assisted trip a vision half as loony as your tale about this morning’s drop-in amnesiac. Almost holding her breath, Lia waits. Then the tape begins to play, and the first voice she hears is her own—“How did you get here?”— followed almost immediately by Kai’s response: “Taxi from Atlanta.” The miniature reels in the cartridge keep turning, and more words issue from the player’s tiny speakers. A powerful feeling of gratitude grips Lia, who murmurs, “It’s real. We’ve got corroboration.”

  “That’s definitely Phil Dick,” Cal says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Once upon a time, in Snowy Falls, I heard him on tape. The guy who had the master of They Scan Us Darkly, Don’t They? smuggled it out of Fullerton and played it for me in his pickup’s cab. Dick was talking about Jung, stuff like that. This is the same voice. This is definitely the man famous for Confessions of a Crap Artist and other masterpieces of American literature.”

  I’ve talked to a dead man, Lia thinks. Or maybe to the soul of Cal’s dead writer clad in its resurrection body—like Christ’s body after its crucifixion and entombment. In addition to the money Kai paid me, I have his voice on tape. Irrefutable corroboration of my interview with him. “Cal—”

  “Let me listen.”

  “I’m cold. I’m getting dressed. Why don’t you—”

  “Go ahead.”

  A pox on you, Lia thinks. From Homo erectus to Homo deflectus in less than five minutes.

  Angry, Lia brushes past her husband, goes to the bedroom, and clothes herself in fresh underwear, blue jeans, heavy socks, and a bulky fish-net sweater. She gathers up keys, change, a paperclip, some other things to put in her pockets. When she returns to the bathroom and looks in on Cal, he’s sitting there like Rodin’s The Thinker, lankier maybe but just as abstracted, totally engrossed in her session with the Man Who Faded Away.

  Time passes. Tape unreels.

  Wide-eyed, Cal raises his head and mutters, “He called me the reason he came to you. He said that I may even be the ‘lens’ that will focus his stereographia.”

  “I know that. Do you have any idea why?”

  “None. Absolutely none.”

  Lia fixed tomato soup and cheese toast for dinner, and although Cal wanted to complain that he’d had nothing to eat today but some blueberry yogurt, he knew that he’d better not.

  “What’re we going to do about this?” he asked.

  “Don’t say another word to me about it, not one more word. I’m not up to it.”

  I should’ve taken her to bed, Cal thought. I should’ve soaped her back and kissed and dried her off and carried her into the bedroom and screwed her until neither of us could think straight. At least we’d’ve had that much pleasure out of this dippy day. My big mistake was abandoning her when she was telling me, with those ever-lovin’ kisses and body bumps, Take me, just like a heroine in a trashy bestseller. She wanted comforting as much as she did sex, but you gave her no comfort and got no release yourself. Now we’re both as tight as clams. And nothing’s been resolved.

  “ ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas,’ ” Cal impulsively recited.

  “What?”

  “That’s the first line of an elegy I wrote for him today.”

  “You wrote Phil Dick an elegy?”

  “Well, sort of. I mean, it isn’t…” (Calvin, you’ve set yourself up for a tumble at the hands of your harshest critic.)

  “What’s the rest of it? Do you remember?”

  Go on, Cal encouraged himself. Recite it and get it over with, or she’ll badger you all evening. Aloud he said, “ ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. / Let’s all queue up to kick God’s ass.’ ”

  Lia just stared at him, a spoonful of soup midway between her bowl and her mouth. Then she said, “Go on.”

  “That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

  “First line’s okay, but the second’s contemptible. Irreverent for the sake of irreverence. Which is crap typical of teenagers or maladjusted adults.”

  “That’s a psychological interpretation.”

  “What did you want?”

  “How about an unbiased aesthetic judgment?”

  “There’s no such animal, Cal.”

  “A decade in Colorado couldn’t completely wipe out your uptight Southern Baptist biases, could it?”

  “What you’ll never figure out, Pickford, is that I’m
not upset because your stupid ‘kick God’s ass’ line rubs me wrong. I’m upset because it demeans you.”

  “Jesus. What you’ll never understand is that I wrote it not to be irreverent but to voice my anger and frustration over an unjust death. Existential outrage, not irreverence, powers that line.”

  “La di da.”

  “But you give me a psychological judgment instead of a literary one. A judgment tainted by small-town religiosity.”

  Whereupon Lia said, “We really should go to church here, Cal. I’ve wanted us to since the first day we arrived.”

  “Dear God.” Me? thought Cal. Squeezed into a pew of the First Baptist Church? I’d have to put my Indian braid down my shirt collar. It even bugs Mr. Kemmings, and the folks at First Baptist are going to find it harder to take than he does. But maybe you might really meet God over there. In Georgia, He has to hang out somewhere around Baptist churches. Too many of the goddamn things to ignore.

  “Dear God,” Lia echoed him. She slurped her tomato soup.

  “Lia, I’m not going to try to publish my elegy.”

  “Good. You wouldn’t find anyone to take it, anyway. If you did, you’d be humiliated by the reviews.”

  “Thanks.” He slurped his own scummy soup. Presently, he said, “Listen, I sold a pair of Brezhnev bears this morning. To a lady who asked me if I’d ever been in trouble with the authorities.”

  Lia straightened. “What did you tell her?”

  “I lied and said no. Scared the shit out of me, though. She was wondering what a fellow my age was doing working in a pet shop, and all I could think to say, loading up her car, was that I was married to a psychologist who worked in Warm Springs. I even gave her your name.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “Maybe she’ll drop in on you.”

  “Probably she won’t.”

  “I’m afraid she’ll drop in at the pet store again, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she looked familiar. I should’ve known who she was. And after all this crazy Phil Dick business, we can’t let anything out of the ordinary go unexamined.” (Like the fact that some sort of troubleshooting goon cased out Mr. K.‘s shop before the lady even entered.)

  “You need to chuck those damn photocopies of his novels.”

  “You need to throw away your tape.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m not chucking my photocopies.”

  Lia stood up and began clearing away dishes.

  Viking, hearing the clink and clatter, came in from the living room; he sat down at her heels to wait for a handout.

  “I’ll get the dishes,” Cal said, standing. It’s the least you can do, cowboy, he told himself.

  “We’re leaving them until we get back.”

  “Get back? From where?”

  “Visiting my mother.”

  “Didn’t you visit her before you left?”

  “I couldn’t. I was too shaken. I spent the afternoon calling local businesses. To keep my mind off … you know. If we go now, we’ll be back by nine-thirty.”

  Christ, Cal thought. Duty calls. And we drag ourselves around endlessly in weary answer to its summons …

  Emily Bonner, Lia’s mother, had a semiprivate room in the east wing of the Eleanor Roosevelt Nursing Home in Warm Springs. The accident that had killed Jim Bonner, Lia’s father, had left Emily badly crippled. She could cruise the corridors of the home in her wheelchair, but she didn’t always gladly greet those who visited her. Cal’s experiences with Emily since relocating in Georgia had been far from pleasant, probably because before the accident she had known him only through photos and telephone conversations. When he said, “Hi, Mom, how’re you doing?” she would shrink away, goggle her eyes, and reply, “I’m fine. I’m not ready to go yet. Why don’t you fly back to God and tell Him I’m happy here?” The only conclusion that Cal had been able to reach was that Miss Emily identified him with the Angel of Death—a paranoid response that made him reluctant to visit her.

  At the nursing home, Cal and Lia parked, leaving Vike to pace the upholstery in the dark rear seat.

  Doing the necessary, the Bonner-Pickfords entered the building in lockstep and proceeded down the hall to Emily’s room. Cal was wondering why Lia couldn’t have made a quick swing by here before coming home, and Lia was wondering why her brother hadn’t made arrangements to keep their mother at Brown Thrasher Barony. Still, Lia enjoyed visiting her mama on her good days, and Cal was glad to get out after brooding all afternoon over Phil Dick’s death.

  Emily was lying in bed watching TV. Lia sat down next to her. Cal, his hands behind him, smiled half-heartedly and said, “Hey, Mom, how you doing?” The show was a PBS documentary—Channel 28—about the mutual benefits of Soviet-American détente: cooperation in space, less military spending, stepped-up trade and cultural exchanges, etcetera. Emily was thoroughly absorbed.

  “Mama,” Lia said. “Are you okay?”

  “How could she be okay?” said Emily’s roommate, Phoebe Flack, an octogenarian who made Lia think of the droll little dolls carved from dried apples. “I want to see The Sinatra Hour on CBS, but she won’t let me. She’s making me watch this boring crud about us and the Rooshuns.” Phoebe jerked her hand at the TV set.

  A lucid light appeared in Emily’s eyes. “You’ve already seen your boring programs, Phoebe. Every evening, right after dear old Ronnie on the news, the same silly thing, Death Valley Days or a General Electric Theater rerun. It was my turn to choose.”

  “She’s watching out of spite,” Phoebe complained to Lia.

  Lia wondered if maybe Phoebe had a case. Only rarely had Miss Emily displayed much interest in television. And never, to Lia’s knowledge, in news, sports, or documentaries. This was weird. It was like finding a polar bear taking a voluntary stroll through the Sahara. But her mama’s gaze was firmly riveted to the screen.

  “Mama, I think Phoebe’s right. Why not let her watch Sinatra? Besides, you’ve got company—Cal and me.”

  “This is important. I’m tired of watching junk. This shows us what the President’s done to bring sanity back to the world.”

  Ouch, thought Cal. The doctors say it isn’t Alzheimer’s, that she’s capable of thinking in clear, logical progressions … but she’s obviously lost her grip on the reality that’s here for her to think about now.

  Emily looked directly at him. “Do you believe that an unending state of tension between us and the Soviets is healthy, Calvin?”

  Cal was taken aback, not simply because she had spoken to him—a rarity—but also because she had challenged his latest thought.

  He stammered, “N-no, ma’am. It’s just that—”

  “Why don’t y’all be quiet and let me finish watching this? It won’t be on much longer.”

  “Long enough that I won’t get to see Old Blue Eyes,” Phoebe griped. She reached her hand toward Lia. “Take me to the chapel, won’t you, darlin’? I haven’t been down there all day.”

  “I’ll take her,” Cal said, anxious to escape. He brought his mother-in-law’s roommate’s wheelchair out of the closet and began to unfold it. Lia caught his wrists.

  “Mama just spoke to you,” she whispered. “A red-letter date. Stay here with her. I’ll take Phoebe to the chapel.” Maybe, once the PBS program was over, Emily would speak to Cal again, and the two of them—the people who meant more to Lia than anybody else in the world—would finally begin to develop a relationship based on understanding and love. This was not what Cal wanted. “Lia—” he began.

  “Help me get Phoebe in the chair,” his wife said aloud. “Then sit down and keep Mama company.”

  A moment later, pleased with herself, Lia was propelling Phoebe Flack down the long corridor, going past room after room in which a pair of pathetic oldsters lay TV-drugged or chemically sedated; the inmates’ tortoiselike beaks pointed boob-tube—or ceilingward, and the numb resignation of their boxed-up lives quickly stole from Lia the pleasure she had taken from outmaneuvering Ca
l.

  The chapel of the Eleanor Roosevelt Nursing Home was not much bigger than a broom closet. It had wheelchair space, six folding chairs, a tiny altar, and a miniature stained-glass window (lit from behind by a small yellow emergency bulb) above and behind the crucifix at the altar. Lia parked Phoebe in one of the wheelchair slots and sat down on a nearby folding chair.

  Maybe I had another reason—besides leaving Cal and Mama alone together—for coming down here with Phoebe, Lia thought. Maybe, like Phoebe, I came down here to pray, to get close to myself by getting close to God. Wasn’t that why I told Cal that we ought to start going to church? Or am I simply feeling poleaxed by what Shawanda and I witnessed this morning in my office?

  Phoebe Flack was staring at the spooky sheen above the altar cross and moving her wrinkled lips. Lia tried to pray, too. God help me, she silently intoned. God help me. It became her mantra, an incantation, until she felt something in the pocket of her jeans sticking her, destroying her prayerfulness, and she shifted on the chair to dig out this object.

  In her hand, the fish pin that she had found on her blazer that morning. It glinted briefly off Phoebe’s astonished eye.

  Lia’s first response was to fling the pin away from her, as if it were a spider that had crawled onto her palm. But she stopped and stared in consternation—even fear—at the well-wrought piece of jewelry. She set the pin between her denim-encased thighs on the olive-drab metal of the chair. She put her hands on her thighs and fixedly regarded the intaglio fish.

  As the fish grew brighter, more sharply etched, the chapel’s walls and furnishings blurred. Lia’s eyes magnified the object, like a microscope bringing a slide specimen into focus. As for Phoebe Flack, she faded away; so, in fact, did the entire Eleanor Roosevelt Nursing Home. Only the golden fish continued to exist, a touchstone on the disappearing chair.

  Where am I? Lia wonders. Where have I gone? She tries to shut her eyes. It’s hard, almost an impossibility. Finally, though, she manages. Opening them again, she finds herself caparisoned in a wedding gown.