He is still worrying at this, waiting in line at the check-in desk, when this bum appears right in front of him, and thrusts what seems like an unravelling baseball under Phil’s nose.
It is a copy of the pirated novel: Phil’s simmering anger reignites, and burns away every doubt.
It is a cheap paperback printed by some backstreet outfit in South Korea, the thin absorbent paper grainy with wood specks, a smudged picture of a castle silhouetted against the Japanese flag on the cover, his name far bigger than the title. Someone stole a copy of Phil’s manuscript, the one he agreed to shelve, the one his publishers paid handsomely not to publish in one of those tricky deals Emmet is so good at. And some crook, it still isn’t completely clear who, published this cheap completely illegal edition. Emmet told Phil about it a month ago, and Phil’s publishers moved swiftly to get an injunction against its sale anywhere in the USA. But thousands of copies are in circulation anyway, smuggled into the country and sold clandestinely.
And the SFWA, Phil thinks, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Emmet is so right about them, the Swine Fucking Whores of Amerika, they may deny that they have anything to do with the pirate edition, but their bleatings about censorship and their insidious promotion of this blatant violation of my copyright proves they want to drag me down to their level.
Me: the greatest living American novelist. Erich Segal called me that only last month in a piece in The New York Review of Books; Updike joshed me about it during the round of golf we played the day after I gave that speech at Harvard. The greatest living American novelist: of course the SFWA want to claim me for their own propaganda purposes, to pump my life’s blood into their dying little genre.
And now this creature has materialized in front of Phil, like some early version or failed species of human being, with blond hair tangled over his shoulders, a handlebar moustache, dressed in a buckskin jacket and faded blue jeans like Hollywood’s idea of an Indian scout, a guitar slung over his shoulder, fraying black sneakers, or no, those were his feet, bare feet so filthy they looked like busted shoes. And smelling of pot smoke and powerful sweat. This aborigine, this indigent, his hand thrust towards Phil, and a copy of the stolen novel in that hand, as he says, ‘I love this book, man. It tells it like it is. The little men, man, that’s who count, right? Little men, man, like you and me. So could you likesign this for me if it’s no hassle . . .’
And Phil is seized by righteous anger and great wrath, and he smites his enemy right there, by the American Airlines First Class check-in desk. Or at least he grabs the book and tears it in half -the broken spine yielding easily, almost gratefully - and tells the bum to fuck off. Oh, just imagine the scene, the bum whining about his book, his property, and Phil telling the creature he doesn’t deserve to read any of his books, he is banned for life from reading his books, and two security guards coming and hustling the bum away amid apologies to the Great American Novelist. The bum doesn’t go quietly. He screams and struggles, yells that he, Phil, is a fake, a sell-out, man, the guitar clanging and chirping like a mocking grasshopper as he is wrestled away between the two burly, beetling guards.
Phil has to take a couple of Ritalin pills to calm down. To calm his blood down. Then a couple of uppers so he can face the journey.
He still has the book. Torn in half, pages frazzled by reading and rereading slipping out of it every time he opens it, so that he has to spend some considerable time sorting them into some kind of order, like a conjuror gripped by stage-flop sweat in the middle of a card trick, before he can even contemplate looking at it.
Emmet said it all. What kind of commie fag organization would try to blast Phil’s reputation with this cheap shot fired under radar? Circulating it on the campuses of America, poisoning the young minds who should be drinking deep clear draughts of his prose. Not this . . . this piece of dreck.
The Man in the High Castle. A story about an author locked in the castle of his reputation, a thinly disguised parable about his own situation, set in a parallel or alternate history where the USA lost the war and was split into two, the East governed by the Nazis, the West by the Japanese. A trifle, a silly fantasy. What had he been thinking when he wrote it? Emmet was furious when Phil sent him the manuscript. He wasted no words in telling Phil how badly he had fucked up, asking him bluntly, what the hell did he think he was doing, wasting his time with this lame sci-fi crap?
Phil had been stuck, that was what. And he’s still stuck. Ten, fifteen years of writing and rewriting, two marriages made and broken while Phil works on and on at the same book, moving farther and farther away from his original idea, so far out now that he thinks he might never get back. The monster doesn’t even have a title. The Long-Awaited. The Brilliant New. The Great Unfinished. Whatever. And in the midst of this mire, Phil set aside the Next Great Novel and pulled a dusty idea from his files -dating back to 1961, for Chrissake - and something clicked. He wrote it straight out, a return to the old days of churning out sci-fi stories for tiny amounts of money while righteously high on speed: cranked up, cranking out the pages. For a little while he was so happy: just the idea of finishing something made him happy. But Emmet made him see the error of his ways. Made him see that you can’t go back and start over. Made him see the depth of his error, the terrible waste of his energy and his talent.
That was when Phil, prompted by a research paper he discovered, started on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, started dosing himself with high levels of water-soluble vitamins.
And then the pirated edition ofThe Man in the High Castle appeared, and Emmet started over with his needling recriminations and insinuations, whipping up in Phil a fine hot sweat of shame and fury.
Phil puts the thing back in his coat pocket. Leans back in his leather-upholstered First Class seat. Sips his silvery martini. The anger is still burning inside him. For the moment he has forgotten his doubts. Straight to the top, that’s the only answer. Straight to the President.
After a while, he buzzes the stewardess and gets some writing paper. Takes out his gold-nibbed, platinum-cased Cross fountain pen, the pen his publishers gave him to mark the publication of the ten millionth copy of the ground-breaking, genre-bustingThe Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Starts to write:
Dear Mr President: I would like to introduce myself. I am Philip K. Dick and admire and have great respect for your office. I talked to Deputy Narcotics Director Finlator last week and expressed my concern for our country . . .
Things go smoothly, as if the light has opened some kind of path, as if it has tuned Phil’s brain, eliminated all the dross and kipple clagging it. Phil flies to Washington, D.C. and immediately hires a car, a clean light-blue Chrysler with less than a thousand miles on the clock, and drives straight to the White House.
Because there is no point in posting the letter. That would take days, and it might never reach the President. All Phil would get back would be a photograph signed by one of the autograph machines that whir ceaselessly in some White House basement. . .
No, the thing to do is subvert the chain of command, the established order. So Phil drives to the White House: to the White House gate. Where he gives the letter to one of the immaculately turned out Marine guards.
Because of an act of wanton piracy, Sir, the young people, the Black Panthers etc etc do not consider me their enemy or as they call it The Establishment. Which I call America. Which I love. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out. I have done an in-depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist Brainwashing Techniques. . .
Phil walking up to the White House gates in the damp March chill, handing the letter, written on American Airlines notepaper and sealed in an American Airlines envelope, to the Marine. While still buzzing from the uppers he dropped in the LAX washroom.
And driving away to find the hotel he’s booked himself into. Everything going down smoothly. Checking in. Washing up in his room. Wondering if he should use the room menu or find a restaurant, when the phone rings. It’s his
agent. Emmet is downstairs in the lobby. Emmet wants to know what the hell he’s up to.
And suddenly Phil is struck by another flash of light, igniting at the centre of his panic, and by the terrible thought that he is on the wrong path.
* * * *
Phil’s agent, Anthony Emmet, is smart and ferocious and tremendously ambitious. A plausible and worldly guy who, as he likes to put it, found Phil under a stone one day in the early 1950s, when Phil was banging out little sci-fi stories for a living and trying to write straight novels no one wanted to publish. Emmet befriended Phil, guided him, mentored him, argued with him endlessly. Because (he said) he knew Phil had it in him to be huge if he would only quit puttering around with the sci-fi shit. He persuaded Phil to terminate his relationship with the Scott Meredith Agency, immediately sold Phil’s long mainstream novel Voices from the Street to a new publishing outfit, Dynmart, guided Phil through endless rewrites. And Voices, the odyssey of a young man who tries to escape an unfulfilling job and a failing marriage, who is seduced by socialists, fascists and hucksters, but at last finds redemption by returning to the life he once scorned, made it big: it sold over two hundred thousand copies in hardback, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was made into a movie starring Leslie Caron and George Peppard.
But the long struggle withVoices blocked or jammed something in Phil. After the deluge, a trickle: a novel about interned Japanese in the Second World War, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which received respectful but baffled reviews; a slim novella,Earthshaker, cannibalized from an old unpublished novel. And then stalled silence, Phil paralysed by the weight of his reputation while his slim oeuvre continued to multiply out there in the world, yielding unexpected translations in Basque and Turkish, the proceedings of a symposium on the work of Philip K. Dick and Upton Sinclair, an Australian miniseries that blithely transposed the interned Japanese of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into plucky colonial prisoners of war.
Phil hasn’t seen his agent for ten years. It seems to him that Emmet still looks as implausibly young as he did the day they first met, his skin smooth and taut and flawless, as if made of some material superior to ordinary human skin, his keen black eyes glittering with intelligence, his black hair swept back, his black silk suit and white silk shirt sharp, immaculate, his skinny black silk tie knotted just so. He looks like a 1950s crooner, a Mob hit man; he looks right at home in the plush, candlelit red-leather booth of the hotel bar, nursing a tall glass of seltzer and trying to understand why Phil wants to see the President.
‘I’m on the case about the piracy,’ Emmet tells Phil. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I’m going to make this -’ he touches the frazzled book on the table with a minatory forefinger ‘- go away. Just like I made that short-story collection Berkley wanted to put out go away. I have people on this day and night,’ Emmet says, with a glint of dark menace. ‘The morons responsible for this outrage are going to be very sorry. Believe me.’
‘I thought it was about the book,’ Phil says. He’s sweating heavily; the red-leather booth is as snug and hot as a glove, or a cocoon. ‘But now I’m not sure—’
‘You’re agitated, and I completely understand. A horrible act of theft like this would unbalance anyone. And you’ve been self-medicating again. Ritalin, those huge doses of vitamins . . .’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the vitamins,’ Phil says. ‘I got the dosages from Psychology Today.’
‘In a paper about treating a kid with schizophrenic visions,’ Emmet says. ‘I know all about it. No wonder you’re agitated. Last week, I understand, you called the police and asked to be arrested because you were - what was it? - a machine with bad thoughts.’
Phil is dismayed about the completeness of Emmet’s information. He says, ‘I suppose Mike told you about that.’
Mike is Phil’s driver and handyman, installed in a spartan little apartment over Phil’s three-door garage.
Emmet says, ‘Of course Mike told me that. He and I, we have your interests at heart. You have to trust us, Phil. You left without even telling Mike where you were going. It would have taken a lot of work to find you, except I just happen to be in Washington on business.’
‘I don’t need any help,’ Phil tells Emmet. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’
But he’s not so sure now that he does. When the light hit him he knew with absolute certainty that something was wrong with his life. That he had to do something about it. He fixed on the first thing that had come into his head, but now he wonders again if it is the right thing. Maybe, he thinks unhappily, I’m going deeper into what’s wrong. Maybe I’m moving in the wrong direction, chasing the wrong enemy.
Emmet, his psychic antennae uncannily sensitive, picks up on this. He says, ‘You know exactly what to do? My God, I’m glad one of us does, because we need every bit of help to get you out of this mess. Now what’s this about a letter?’
Phil explains with great reluctance. Emmet listens gravely and says, ‘Well, I think it’s containable.’
‘I thought that if I got a badge, I could get things done,’ Phil says. The martini he’s drinking now is mixing strangely with the martinis he drank in the air, with the speed and Ritalin he took in LAX, the speed he took just now in his hotel bedroom. He feels a reckless momentum, feels as if he’s flying right there in the snug, hot booth.
‘You’ve got to calm down, Phil,’ Emmet says. Candlelight glitters in his dark eyes as he leans forward. They look like exquisite gems, Phil thinks, cut with a million microscopic facets. Emmet says, ‘You’re coming up to fifty, and you aren’t out of your mid-life crisis yet. You’re thrashing around, trying this, trying that, when you just have to put your trust in me. And you really shouldn’t be mixing Ritalin and Methedrin, you know that’s contraindicated.’
Phil doesn’t try and deny it; Emmet always knows the truth. He says, ‘It’s as if I’ve woken up. As if I’ve been dreaming my life, and now I’ve woken up and discovered that none of it was real. As if a veil, what the Greeks call dokos, the veil between me and reality has been swept away. Everything connects, Emmet,’ Phil says, picking up the book and waving it in his agent’s face. Loose pages slip out, flutter to the table or to the floor. ‘You know why I have this book? I took it from some bum who came up to me in the airport. Call that coincidence?’
‘I’d say it was odd that he gave you the copy I gave you,’ Emmet says. ‘The agency stamp is right there on the inside of the cover.’ As Phil stares at the purple mark, he adds, ‘You’re stressed out, Phil, and that weird diet of yours has made things worse, not better. The truth is, you don’t need to do anything except leave it all to me. If you’re honest, isn’t this all a complicated ploy to distract yourself from your real work? You should go back to LA tonight, there’s a Red Eye that leaves in two and a half hours. Go back to LA and go back to work. Leave everything else to me.’
While he talks, Emmet’s darkly glittering gaze transfixes Phil like an entomologist’s pin, and Phil feels that he is shrivelling in the warm darkness, while around him the noise of conversation and the chink of glasses and the tinkle of the piano increases, merging into a horrid chittering buzz.
‘I hate this kind of jazz,’ Phil says feebly. ‘It’s so goddam fake, all those ornate trills and runs that don’t actually add up to anything. It’s like, at LAX, the soupy strings they play there.’
‘It’s just background music, Phil. It calms people.’ Emmet fishes the slice of lemon from his mineral water and pops it in his mouth and chews, his jaw moving from side to side.
‘Calms people. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It deadens them, Emmet. Turns them into fakes, into unauthentic people. It’s all over the airwaves now, there’s nothing left but elevator music. And as for TV . . . It’s the corporations, Emmet, they have it down to a science. See, if you pacify people, take away all the jagged edges, all the individualism, the stuff that makes us human - what have you got? You have androids, docile machines. All the kid
s want to do now is get a good college degree, get a good job, earn money. There’s no spark in them, no adventure, no curiosity, no rebellion, and that’s just how the corporations like it. Everything predictable because it’s good for business, everyone hypnotized. A nation of perfect, passive consumers.’
Emmet says, ‘Is that part of your dream? Christ, Phil. We really do need to get you on that Red Eye. Away from this nonsense, before any real damage is done. Back to your routine. Back to your work.’
‘This is more important, Emmet. I really do feel as if I’m awake for the first time in years.’
A man approaches their booth, a tall overweight man in a shiny grey suit and cowboy boots, black hair swept back and huge sideburns framing his jowly face. He looks oddly bashful for a big man and he’s clutching something - the paperback of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. He says to Phil, ‘I hope you don’t mind, sir, but I would be honoured if you would sign this for me.’
‘We’re busy,’ Emmet says, barely glancing at the man, but the man persists.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 19
