11
“WHY WOULD she come here to buy Brezhnev bears?” Cal asked Mr. Kemmings. “It makes no sense.”
“I know that. I was asking myself the same thing on the drive out from town.”
Cal, as good as his word, had reached the pet shop only a few minutes after his boss and for the past half hour had been cleaning out the shit from the puppy and kitten pens or else replacing the spattered newsprint in half a dozen rattan bird cages. Mr. K. was upset. He had arrived upset, having spotted Grace Rinehart at the arts salon and recognized her instantly as yesterday’s customer in cape, sunglasses, and duded-up riding apparel. Something was going on … but what?
To Cal, the fact that he had sold the famous film actress and Americulturator a pair of naked guinea pigs seemed the least of his troubles. Today, at least. Yesterday, the mystery of the woman’s identity had bugged him bunches, especially when she’d asked him if he’d ever been in hot water with the law, but today he couldn’t let himself worry too much about the Secretary of Agriculture’s wife. Maybe she’d been checking out the Brezhnev bears to see how those on sale in pet shops measured up against the ones that her bigshot hubby Hiram bred—whether they seemed healthier, less healthy, or somehow subtly different from the Berthelot cavies. Maybe she had wanted to inject a little jet-set cash into the local economy, even with a nonessential purchase. Cal refused to speculate. After all, he had a more urgent concern: Yesterday he and Lia and been visited by a dead man who could not remember that he was, or had been, a controversial American writer.
Mr. K. finally picked up on Cal’s mood. “How you doin’ today?” he asked. “You better?”
“Yes, sir. The shock’s worn off.”
“Did you hear about the latest suicide at Von Braunville?”
“On the car radio driving up, yes, sir, I did.”
“Sad,” Mr. Kemmings said. “Sad.”
“Yes, sir. Death’s nearly always sad.” No truer words were ever spoken, Cal thought. Unless you were suffering like crazy or long past your prime, death fell on you with all the welcomeness of a bout of genital herpes.
“On The Today Show, this NASA fella said that maybe they’ll send pets up there to help the moon folk fight depression. Pets and plants.”
“Umm,” Cal said, using a cloth soaked in boric acid to wipe the matter out of an Airedale puppy’s eye.
“Wouldn’t I love to have a piece of that concession?” the old man admitted. “Wonder if they’ll take bids.”
“I doubt it. Buddy-buddy favoritism will come into play. If they did, though, you could probably undercut the competition with a thousand-dollar parakeet or a million-buck black snake. NASA’s about like the Pentagon when it comes to getting took.”
“Careful there, Pickford. Careful.”
Mr. K. put a ringer to his lips to stress the need for caution, but he was smiling, and Cal smiled back. Then Mr. K. left to wait on a customer, leaving Cal to finish wiping gunk from the eyes of yet another Happy Puppy.
Last night, returning to Pine Mountain from the nursing home, Lia had said, “Listen, Cal, I lost the fish pin you gave me. It fell off my chair in the chapel onto the floor, and even though I got down on my hands and knees, I couldn’t find it.”
“I never gave you that pin.”
“You did. You just don’t remember. It stood in for a ring at our wedding in the Garden of the Gods.”
“Lia, we were married in Arvill Rudd’s house.”
“Kai—Philip K. Dick—the man who came to see me this morning—he told me not to lose that pin. He called it, jokingly, I think, a linchpin.”
“It was on your blazer when you got home from work tonight, Lia. I don’t think you took it to the nursing home with you at all. You can relax.”
“I didn’t think I had, either. But it was in my pocket when I got Phoebe down to the chapel, and looking at it, I saw you and me as we should’ve been at our wedding. Then, damn it, I lost it.”
All the way home, Viking prowling the backseat like a creature from Norse mythology, Lia had worried about the fish pin that Cal could not even remember giving her. Finally, in their apartment, she had rummaged her jewelry boxes, double-checking, and in only a moment her fingers had tweezered out the pin that she thought she had lost in the nursing home.
“You must not’ve had it with you there.”
“But I did, Cal. I swear to you, I really did.”
“Maybe you had two of them all along.”
“Until this morning, I didn’t know I had even one.”
Putting up the bottle of boric acid and ignoring the yaps of a terrier who didn’t want him to leave, Cal recalled that this whole fish-pin mystery had irritated him. Lia had suffered a delusional spell triggered by the trauma of taking on a resurrected dead man as a client. On the other hand, if you could believe that, why not the additional improbability that a pin lost in Warm Springs could pop up an hour later in a jewelry box in Pine Mountain?
Because empirically received physical laws didn’t all start falling to pieces at once. At least a few things had to go on nonsensically making sense.
“I think Kai put it back for me,” Lia had said. “He must have wanted to give me another chance.”
Your mother dips snuff, Cal had wanted to reply, but right now, this morning, he began to weigh the possibility that Lia’s bizarre theory was correct, and finally he saw it not only as a cogent but also as an inevitable explanation.
Kai—P. K. Dick—wanted them to know that in all the unforeseen trials ahead, he was on their side. They could count on him—or, that is, his lingering aura—to support and uphold their fight for justice in a reality—this reality—through which evil had already spread like a many-fingered oil slick.
That’s right, thought Cal sardonically, Lia and I are agents for truth, justice, and righteousness, and our secret ally is a coffee-drinking, snuff-dipping ghost who can’t always keep from fading off into Nowheresville when he drops in to see us.
What was it that Dick, ineptly superimposed on Emily Bonner’s crippled body, had said last night in the nursing home? “You know better than I do why I’ve picked you out.” But I don’t, I really don’t. I’m a displaced Sangre de Cristo ranch hand, taking care of house pets when I ought to be seeing about livestock—calves that bawl, colts that balk, and bulls that’ll butt down fences.
That, Phil, is the reality I’m homesick for…
At noon, while Mr. Kemmings drove downtown for a chili dog at Charlie Joseph’s, Le Boi Loan came into the Pet Emporium. Cal was surprised to see him. In the eight weeks that Cal had been at the mall, he had never encountered the Vietnamese outside the confines of Gangway Books. Lone Boy took his duties there seriously, and, his Americulturation aside, he apparently didn’t much enjoy window shopping or browsing through other stores. Cal had bought a Chick-Fil-A sandwich and returned with it to the pet shop. When Lone Boy tentatively entered, Cal was seated on an empty puppy cage in the back having lunch. In the forward half of the shop, the Vietnamese eyed the enormous green parrot on its perch near the cash register, squinted askance at the snakes, and openly admired the energetic hamsters and gerbils.
Like a little kid in somebody else’s house, Cal decided. All it would take to make him leap ten feet straight up was the word boo. So Cal rattled the ice in his cup to let Lone Boy know that he was not alone in the shop.
“Howdy, Calvin,” Lone Boy said. “What’s going down?”
Cal lifted his sandwich and then his paper cup. “Only lunch, Lone Boy. What can I do for you?”
“Yesterday you were all bent out of shape by that Dick fella dying. Just thought I’d see how you were getting along.”
Another surprise. Cal was touched by Lone Boy’s embarrassed concern. He would’ve never figured the Vietnamese for the type; ordinarily, Lone Boy affected a tough-guy exterior that Cal, early on, had pegged—perhaps unfairly—as proof of a basic shallowness of purpose and character. Today, though, the tough guy had left Gangway Books to come i
nquire about his frame of mind.
“I’m okay, Lone Boy. I’m doing okay.”
Lone Boy looked nervously around the shop. “I put your Pouch House order in, Calvin. Don’t sweat it. Soon as those books hit my counter, I’ll run ‘em down here to you.”
“You don’t have to do that. I can—”
“Hey, I want to, okay? I can see what it means to you.”
“Stupid sentimentality, Lone Boy. I associate that guy’s books with Colorado, old friends, a whole different world.”
Abruptly, Lone Boy appeared to lose interest in the matter. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. “How can you choke down your lunch in here, Calvin? I mean, you know … the stink.”
Cal laughed. “Think this is bad? You ought to hang around a feedlot for beef cattle in ninety-plus-degree temperatures.”
“I’d gag. I have to have it, you know, clean— before I can enjoy whatever Tuyet’s fixed me for eating.”
What could you say to that? Cal could think of only banalities and so kept his mouth shut. This was a strange visit. Now that he had fulfilled his sympathy-dispensing role, Lone Boy seemed to be at loose ends, and Cal had no idea how to help him. They had very little in common, Loan’s employment in a bookstore and Cal’s love of reading notwithstanding, and unless Lone Boy decided to buy some guppies or a Brezhnev bear or something, they were probably doomed to a long session of smiling and nodding.
But Lone Boy said, “You live in Pine Mountain, don’t you?”
Cal admitted that he did.
“And how does somebody looking for your house find it?”
Cal gave Lone Boy directions, the straightforward ones that he gave everyone who wanted to find his place: You came down Highway 27 from LaGrange, turned right at Pine Mountain’s first traffic light, and stopped at the redbrick duplex on the corner of Chipley Street and King Avenue. Easy.
“Why do you ask?”
Lone Boy hesitated before saying, “When the weather improves, we should meet—y’all, the Bonner-Pickfords, and us, the Loans—for a burger cookout. For relaxing. For friendship’s sake.”
That’s nice, Cal thought. You’ve invited yourself to my house for dinner. We don’t even have one of those potbellied metal grills that you push around on lopsided rubber tires.
Suddenly, Lone Boy crimsoned. “That was rude as hell, wasn’t it? Forgive me, I didn’t mean to impose my whole everlovin’ family on you and your woman. All I meant was—”
“No sweat, Lone Boy. Maybe we could get together in Roosevelt State Park one weekend. They’ve got plenty of grills.”
“No, no. I should’ve invited you and the missus to our place first. Fuckin’ bad manners.” He shook his head. “That’s what I meant to do. But I didn’t get much sleep last night. Sometimes working two jobs strings me out and makes me stupid.”
“Really. It’s okay.”
Still embarrassed, Lone Boy rocked on his heels. “You’ll have to come to our place one of these days.”
“That’d be nice.” In fact, maybe it wouldn’t be bad at all. Cal had seen Lone Boy’s little girls in Gangway Books with their mother one afternoon, and he couldn’t imagine encountering a more appealing, a more handsome, family.
But their conversation had reached another impasse. Lone Boy peered about self-consciously, scratching a fingernail against the glass of an aquarium. He looked ready to go, but apparently had no idea how to manage a graceful exit.
Finally, he said, “Did you know that Grace Rinehart was once in a movie version of The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt?
“Yeah, I guess I did. Vaguely.”
“Only a few people got to see it. Rinehart had it yanked from circulation and bought up all the prints.”
“I think I’d heard that, too.”
“Well, I’m one of the few people who’s seen it, and Rinehart stunk up her part. I mean she was lousy.”
What was the point of this story? And where had Lone Boy seen a film unavailable since the early 1960s. It occurred to Cal that Lone Boy was lying. Not about the badness of Rinehart’s acting in Thisbe Holt, but about having seen the movie. But why bother to lie about such a thing? Was Loan trying to forge a bond between them, letting Cal know that although giants might walk the halls of West Georgia Commons, they did so on feet of clay? Or did he even know that the actress had visited the Pet Emporium yesterday?
“Everyone has off days,” Cal said noncommittally.
“Lucky for Rinehart she can buy up the pudding proof of hers.”
“I guess so.”
“See you later,” Lone Boy blurted. “Come down to Gangway when you can and put in another weird-ass order.”
“How about a video cassette of Thisbe Holt?
“Don’t you wish? Don’t you wish?” Lone Boy backpedaled away from Cal and exited onto the main concourse of the mall.
Later that afternoon, Cal was going past the glass cage housing My Main Squeeze, the boa constrictor, when the air seemed to redden and the muscles in his arms and legs to lose their elasticity. He felt, suddenly, as sluggish as a snake must after gulping down a rasher of nine white rats. He halted, reaching out to the glass to steady himself and noting that the strange redness of the shop’s atmosphere had moved by osmosis into the corridors beyond. All the shoppers in West Georgia Commons, including the patrons of the pet store, had stopped moving; they stood in dreamlike frozen postures wherever the shimmering redness had captured them.
Cal himself could only barely move, and surveying the bizarre scene, he found that the mall reminded him of a vast classical ruin filled with black-cherry Jell-O. Every person in the tableau was a morsel in a tinted aspic of stasis.
“My God,” Cal said. He could hear these words, but everything else—nearly everything else—was silence.
What wasn’t silence was a bumping on the glass behind his hand; looking, he saw that My Main Squeeze had lifted the forward coils of its body and was spiraling toward the screen-covered lid of the cage. If the boa kept rising, it would push the lid back and spill out into the shop.
“Stay where you are, Squeeze. Ain’t nothing out here for you. You couldn’t possibly like black-cherry Jell-O.”
“It’s me.” The boa halted. “Have you already forgotten?”
“Mr. Dick?”
The boa’s blunt-nosed head, beady eyes, and flickering tongue hypnotized Cal, freezing him as the redness had frozen everyone else. Except that, if he really tried, he could move; it was only his astonishment transfixing him.
“I guess. Whatever my name is, I talked to your wife yesterday morning and to you last night, and I’m back for a few minutes.”
With difficulty, Cal indicated the grotesque red-black gelatin quivering all about them. “How did you do that?”
“I didn’t do it, Pickford. I’m benefitting, momentarily, from the phenomenon, but its true author is the demiurge whose messenger I am. I see that now.”
“Demiurge?”
“The subordinate deity responsible for this reality. It can do whatever it wants to here. We’re only its puppets, no matter how self-sufficient we may think ourselves.”
“Not very,” Cal admitted.
“Yeah, well, that’s right. Yesterday morning, I came back from the dead in a resurrection body. Last night, as a plasma quivering around the material form of your wife’s mother. But today, alas, only as a goddamn herpetological ventriloquist. This must’ve been the way Satan felt in the Garden of Eden. Anyway, it’s a reverse progression, Cal, a devolution, and I sure as hell don’t know if I’ll be back again. Certainly, I don’t know what shape you’ll find me in next time. I admit it. The voice that’s using me—that’s letting me talk through this snake—it’s fickle. It’s struggling to impose order on events just the way that you and I do in our own daily lives. Ineptly.”
“Whoa. You’re confusing the hell out of me.”
“Listen, the important thing for you to remember, Pickford, is that there’re other realities and some of them are better than thi
s one. Some lots better. Some only a little. Some frighteningly worse. When I’m disembodied, I can float among them, searching for the best of all existing worlds to plop down on this one. Call it stereographic imposition, if you want to give it a name.”
“I don’t want to give it anything, Mr. Dick. I just want out of this humongous weird you’re laying on Lia and me.”
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a … well, I don’t have any sting in this state. Death doesn’t, either. I’m going to need help to make anything at all happen. I can float from reality to reality, looking, testing, but my ability to effect a stereographic imposition—that’s severely limited. You see, the demiurge doesn’t want to invest me with too much power, fearing I’ll take on greater importance in this reality than its true author. So I’m probably going to drop out of sight for a while—not my doing, Pickford, but the demiurge’s. Granted, it permitted me to return from the dead, but it’s also a jealous sucker, and its jealousy has resulted in my devolution—in three neat steps—from man to mist to talking boa. It set entropy loose on me, and now I’m depending on you—you and your pretty wife—to keep entropy from devouring us all for good. You guys have got to engineer the redemptive shift.”
Was this how the serpent in the Garden of Eden had talked to Eve? Surely not. If Mr. Dick was tempting Cal, and he seemed to be trying to, the precise nature of the temptation was impossible to characterize.
“You’re talking in generalities,” Cal said. “You want Lia and me to, uh, ‘engineer the redemptive shift’. How, for God’s sake?”
“By taking risks,” the snake said, bumping the glass. “By not permitting yourself to get too cozy.”
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 14
