Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “True, true,” Kai, alias Philip K. Dick, tells Vear. “This is a dream, an hallucination. On the other hand, isn’t life a dream? And this dream, right now, is more real for you than anything else happening around you. If you decide I’m an irreality, well, you’ll get cancelled too. Goes with the territory, Major.”

  This speech frightens Vear. It has the ring of authenticity, as if this dwarf, Dick’s current hypostasis, knows exactly whereof he speaks. So play along, the major advises himself. Pretend that this is really happening so that a failure to pretend doesn’t wipe you totally out of existence forever.

  “If you’re Philip K. Dick,” Vear says, trying to disguise the quaver in his voice, “why do you look like… that?”

  “Because I’m dead, Gordon, and my own glorified body has only recently ascended to the Holy One. But my consciousness—my soul, you know—hangs on here because the demiurge of this creation (a decidedly lowercase creation) has charged me with rectifying the nightmare that made Nyby and the others up here commit suicide. I mean, up here you can watch how bad everything’s going down there, and your despair’s enlarged by your perspective on the whole mess. And by the bleakness of your surroundings.”

  “But a dwarf?” Dolly says. “A black dwarf?”

  “Well, the dwarf himself is still alive. I’m just piloting his body. From what I can guess about him, inhabiting him as I do, the angelic hierarchy and some other intermediate souls have also made occasional use of him. He permits it, this Kenneth ‘Horsy’ Stout, because essentially he’s a good man. Also, he likes to travel. He regards benevolent possession—by angels, by in-betweener gofers like me—as a sort of reward for bearing with the handicap of his dwarfism. For overcoming it.”

  “And is that Stout’s actual physical body?” Vear asks. (If any aspect of this situation deserves the designation “actual”.)

  “It’s an incorruptible, virtually indestructible version of his physical body. Glorified before it’s time, you know, but subject again to all the slings and arrows that flesh is heir to—at least, that is, when I return it to the consciousness, or soul, dormant in its physical husk. Which lies in a stable outside Pine Mountain.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dolly says. “If you don’t take this person’s body or soul, what exactly are you taking?”

  “Not taking. Borrowing. What I’m borrowing is a potential, the spiritual body that Stout will become when he himself dies and is raised incorruptible from death.”

  That’s like taking a leaner from next year’s new-car models, Vear thinks. Can’t be done.

  Kai says, “When I borrowed his posthumous potential this time, Horsy was reading a book of mine, and my novel triggered anamnesis in me. Suddenly, I lost my forgetfulness, and remembered my name, and recalled that I’d been to Von Braunville once before. Just to case the joint.”

  “Why would you want to ‘case the joint’? ” Vear asks. “What at Von Braunville is of any interest to a ghost?”

  “I’m not a ghost, I’m an apparition-at-one-remove. I cased Von Braunville because the core of religion is service to the needy, and you guys up here and all the people on Earth are definitely in need. I wanted you to resolve the problem yourselves, but now I don’t think you can, and so I’ve come to help. And I’ve come here because I’ve got good intelligence—divine, or at least demiurgic, intelligence—that this is where you three guys, and maybe a couple of others, can best engineer the redemptive shift.”

  Dolly says, “What do you mean, ‘redemptive shift’?”

  “Getting rid of this oppressive historical reality and calling up a freer, more humane reality. Lately, I’ve been able to visit—or my soul has—an attractive alternative to this time line, and that’s the one you guys need to shift over to. You can do it from Censorinus by taking a forthcoming opportunity—one you’ll probably never get again—to abreact history.”

  Vear has not been able to follow Kai’s argument very well, but he can see that Erica Zola looks preternaturally alert. Her eyes, normally quite big, now seem as large as gongs.

  “ ‘Abreact’? ” she says. “You’re putting a psychological term in a strange context. Could you be a little clearer, Mr. Dick?”

  “Please call me Kai. Okay. Look at this. In your profession, doctor, abreact means to express and discharge a heavy emotional burden—unconscious shit—by talking it out in a session with a therapist. Someone like you. But let’s broaden abreaction to give it an historical application.”

  “But how? The term’s specific to my field.”

  “How else but by analogy, Dr. Zola? Just suppose that beneath this historical reality lies an unconscious dimension of suppressed events—an entire suppressed history, in fact—that we can bring up and make manifest by … well, by abreacting them. We’d change history. We’d free these trapped occurrences, permitting them to supplant the warped events making up our own nightmarish time line, and the latter would submerge and sink out of sight, out of mind. Which would effect the redemptive shift—yeah, I know, I’m mixing metaphors—that I’ve been talking about.”

  “It’s a neat analogy, abreacting a suppressed time line,” Dolly says, “but—”

  “But what, Mr. Dahlquist?”

  “You’re assuming that history, like consciousness, has layers. Or, if not layers, unseen collateral cousins. I don’t assume that is has either, and if I did, Mr. Dick, I’d wonder how you propose to get the suppressed layers, or the invisible collateral cousins, up into the sunshine.”

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me. I’m not assuming anything. I’ve gone over to this other time line. I’ve walked around in it, I’ve examined my own place there, and I’ve taken note—O my little ones—of the big discrepancies between that time line’s events and this one’s.”

  Vear’s mouth is cottony. He takes a swig of grape pop and asks Kai to fling him a few more crackers. Kai closes the lid on the box and shuffleboards it to him. Vear grabs a handful of crackers and passes the box to Dolly, who liberates a share for himself before proffering it to Erica. Meanwhile, warm grape drink fizzes on the major’s tongue with all the pizzazz of a day-old glass of Alka-Seltzer. Why, he wonders, does Kai call us “O my little ones” when he’s so small himself?

  Dolly says, “What are the major discrepancies, Mr. Dick?”

  “I can’t enumerate them. It would take too long. Things are better there. Better, that is, by comparison. The upsetting thing to me is that although the two time lines run nearly parallel until 1968, one of the big differences before ‘68 is that over here I’m an important American writer but over there I’m a purveyor of genre trash. That’s their critical consensus, anyway. That I wrote crap—mindless sci-fi about parallel times, paranoia, androids, aliens, and God. Shit like that.”

  “Books like Valis?” Dolly asks.

  “Yeah. Of course, I wrote speculative stuff like that even in your time line, but it’s all unpublished. What hurts is that, over there, it’s the only part of my work, by and large, that’s seen print and the literary establishment—the New York Times and that bunch—dismisses it as pop-culture trivia. In their view, I belong to the trash stratum and my work is eminently dismissable.

  “I do have a cult following over there, but A Time For George Stavros, Pilgrim on the Hill, The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt— no one in that time line even thought ‘em worth publishing. My cult is a fuckin’ category cult, sci-fi fans who think Phil Dick has a pipeline to the Deity. I mean, I guess I should be glad to have a cult, but it’s awful knowing that my early realist novels didn’t rate publication over there. And I’ve got a group named for me—the PKD Appreciation Society—full of kids who believe They Scan Us Darkly, Don’t They? is better than Nicholas and the Higs.”

  Erica takes a sip of grape pop. “But that’s the time line you want us to shift over to? A time line in which you’re regarded as the trash slinger that the Nixon administration, over here, has been trying to label you for years.”

  “Hey, listen, don’t th
ink I like it. I don’t like it, having a part of my canon fall between the cracks and disappear. But if that’s the price to be paid to abreact a freer time line, fine. I mean, it’s a small sacrifice, and who am I in the big picture? The genuinely big picture. Just a writer. That’s all.”

  Erica sets her soda can down, eases herself off her stool, and walks toward the dwarf with her hands on her hips, pondering what Kai has just told them. Kai, watching her, raises his hands in a gesture signifying, That’s close enough, don’t come too near, I’m not ready for contact. Erica respects his prohibition but lingers at the edge of his spooky aura, and Vear finds himself admiring the psychotherapist for her courage.

  “Isn’t there any other downside to this shift?” she demands.

  For everything taken, something’s given, Vear thinks, recalling his imaginary talk with President Nixon. And vice versa. And it’s the vice versa that scares us. What must the world at large—not just Philip K. Dick—give up to abreact this freer, more humane time line? An important question.

  Kai says, “I’m not supposed to talk about the differences that occur after ‘68, Dr. Zola. I’m only permitted to say that for the most part, it’s a better world than this one.”

  “Who’s doing this permitting and not-permitting?” she demands.

  “I think that goes without saying, don’t you?”

  “Then maybe this cult of yours—in the suppressed time stream—is correct in thinking that you have a pipeline to the Deity.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. But I’m a spirit now, and I wasn’t then. And, technically, this discussion is taking place wholly outside time. Don’t use it as a measuring stick for my activities when I was mortal, either in this time stream or another.”

  Vear steels himself to speak. “You’ve given us the personal downside of the alternative history you want us to summon, but you have to tell us if there’s a major political price to pay. You can’t expect us to conspire to ‘abreact’ your submerged time line—however the hell we’d do that—while we’re ignorant of the global consequences. Your readiness to sacrifice your literary reputation to make things ‘better’ doesn’t prove you’ve taken every important issue into consideration.”

  Dolly says, “Tell us something about this other reality.”

  From his Buddha posture, the dwarf sighs. “Okay, two things. Are they good, bad, or both at once? It’ll be up to you guys to decide. I’m here to rescue the United States—not necessarily the world—from the situation that it’s got itself into. I really see no alternative. But because I’m enlisting you to help me, I guess you deserve something in the way of information.”

  “Give, then,” says Erica, audibly impatient.

  “Okay. First, the United States loses the Vietnam War. Or we put our South Vietnamese allies into a position that automatically loses it for them. Same difference.”

  “That’s no small thing,” Vear says. “That would drastically alter the balance of power in Indochina. And I can’t imagine that it’d be for the better, Mr. Dick.”

  Dolly says, “And the second thing?”

  “Because of the prolongation of the war and our retreat before the North Vietnamese, the space program gets put on hold. In the 1982 of my submerged time line, the US doesn’t have a moonbase. Von Braunville doesn’t exist. In fact, it probably won’t exist any time before the turn of the century.”

  Vear listens as both Dolly and Erica tell the dwarf that these seem incredibly dubious examples of how abreacting the suppressed time line is going to improve the world. He must be joking. Is King Richard’s reign—one authorized and acquiesced in by the vast majority of Americans—so terrible that they should risk permitting a communist victory in Vietnam and the complete dismantling of the American space program?

  Kai, still in the lotus position, explains that they object to the proposed abreaction because they fear that these two startling changes may ramify into unknown historical horrors. Well, they’re taking a short-range view of the matter. Besides, Kai’s suppressed time line features the full restoration of constitutional democracy in the United States, the example of which has long-term benefits that override the not inconsiderable disadvantages of the defeat in Vietnam and the slowdown—not the complete dismantling—of American efforts in space.”

  The submerged reality, though far from perfect, is better than this one. Nyby would not have died there, neither would the other NASA people who committed suicide at Censorinus. These deaths are insignificant statistically, given the population of the United States, but have great symbolic import and a telling correlation to the increase in suicides nationwide. Moreover, the fact that King Richard’s reign has unaccountably flourished has given immeasurable aid and comfort, globally, to totalitarians of both the right and the left. The execrable Return to Your Roots Program is blatantly racist in intent and execution. And, according to an outlawed watchdog organization, the number of administration “enemies” who simply “disappear” has nearly doubled every year since the defeat of the North Vietnamese in 1974. The fact that the media are under administration control has either disguised or excused these abuses of power, and most Americans prudently look the other way.

  “But why come to us?” Dolly asks. “Us of all people?”

  Recites the dwarf, gazing at the chamber’s ceiling, “ ‘Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. / Let’s all queue up to kick God’s ass.’ ”

  Dolly’s elegy, Vear thinks. Kai overheard Dolly’s little elegy and from it deduced his potential sympathy for the abreaction of a “more humane” time line.

  “And Major Vear? He’s on my side because he hates our drift to totalitarianism and admires the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton. He’s been waiting—he didn’t know it, but he has—for a chance like this to come along.”

  “And me?” asks Erica Zola.

  “You’re a former classmate of a young woman named Lia Pickford, née Bonner. You briefly met her husband while attending school in Colorado Springs, and the three of you partied together one evening with a bottle of wine and some top-grade pot and a contraband Jefferson Airplane album playing in the background. You resonated in time to the music. You got off on a P. K. Dick reading that Cal Pickford subjected you to. And you found yourself agreeing—while high on liebfraumilch and stoned on Colombian Gold—with everything negative that he and I had to say about You-Know-Who. Of course, then you returned to your studies and forgot the whole evening, but maybe my manifestation has triggered anamnesis and you know what I’m saying again. Possible?”

  Erica appears stunned. You hit it on the head, Vear thinks. She’s trying to digest what you’ve told her.

  “I remember,” she admits. “You’re right.”

  “But you sublimated your love of justice to a personal quest to become one of the first five women to serve at Von Braunville. And you succeeded. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Erica says, dubiously.

  And then no one speaks for a time. Vear can tell that as weird as this audience with the dwarf is, all three of them—not one of whom has ever been much of a rebel—relish the opportunity to help the Kai manifestation topple the tyrant whose government has given them their jobs. They long to effect the mysterious abreaction that will erase a US victory in Indochina. That will cause the domes of Von Braunville in the crater called Censorinus to vanish from the lunar landscape as if no one ever built them.

  Which, if the abreaction succeeds, no one will have…

  Dolly says, “Okay, we’re game, Mr. Dick. But how do we do what you want us to do, and when do we do it?”

  “Watch and wait,” says the dwarf, relentlessly fading.

  As soon as the apparition was gone, Vear walked to the end of the sorting stand. He put his palm on the spot where Kai’s bottom had rested. It was warmer than nearby areas of the tabletop. Was it possible to hallucinate a “haint” that was… real? He had just done so. In the company of a respected psychotherapist and a computer scientist famous for his spaced-out rationality.
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  “Did this happen?” he asked them.

  Neither replied. With them, however, he saw that the box of crackers from which they had eaten and the cans of grape soda from which they had drunk were no longer on the table. Nor could they find an open crate that might have held the cracker box or a break in the row of soda cans to show that Kai had removed three for his bewildered guests. All that proved to them that the dwarf had been there was, yes, the warm spot on the sorting stand.

  “And our memories that this really happened,” Vear said. “You do remember this experience the same way I do, don’t you?”

  The three of them compared. Their individual memories of the past forty minutes matched. What had happened had happened. Or else they had shared a common hallucination. Erica led them out of the various bays of the warehouse cavern and into the tunnel to the men’s dormitory dome. As they walked, they noticed that the air had a pinkish tinge, as if a cloud of red smoke were in the final stages of dissipating. The domes’ filter system was working to suck up the anamolous smoke—from what? from where?—and to vent it out onto the lunar night.

  Or was it?

  Seeing two of their NASA colleagues frozen in midstride, Vear recalled that Kai had said that, objectively speaking, no time at all would pass while they talked to him.

  Back in their own room, Dolly confirmed this claim. They had returned to their dormitory hardly a minute after leaving it. So none of them would show up late this “morning” for an assignment. Like the air in the domes, they were completely in the clear. All they had to worry about was the puzzling import of their outrageous collective memory.