Vintage PKD (20 page)

In the midst of his shattered landscape, which one can trace back to Gloria Knudson’s death, Fat imagined God had cured him. Once you notice Pyrrhic victories they seem to abound.

It reminds me of a girl I once knew who was dying of cancer. I visited her in the hospital and did not recognize her; sitting up in her bed she looked like a little old hairless man. From the chemotherapy she had swollen up like a great grape. From the cancer and the therapy she had become virtually blind, nearly deaf, underwent constant seizures, and when I bent close to her to ask her how she felt she answered, when she could understand my question, “I feel that God is healing me.” She had been religiously inclined and had planned to go into a religious order. On the metal stand beside her bed she had, or someone had, laid out her rosary. In my opinion a FUCK YOU, GOD sign would have been appropriate; the rosary was not.

Yet in all fairness, I have to admit that God—or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics—had fired precious information at Horselover Fat’s head by which their son Christopher’s life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology,
noös
or Mind is persuading
ananke
or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission.
Noös
happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which
noös
imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape.
Noös
or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.” Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.

We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation because he always got angry, taking the point of view that what we said on the topic mattered—that the topic itself mattered. By now he had become totally whacked out. We enjoyed introducing the discussion by way of some careless comment: “Well, God gave me a ticket on the freeway today” or something like that. Ensnared, Fat would leap into action. We whiled away the time pleasantly in this fashion, torturing Fat in a benign way. After we left his place we had the added satisfaction of knowing he was writing it all down in the journal. Of course, in the journal his view always prevailed.

No need existed to bait Fat with idle questions, such as, “If God can do anything can he create a ditch so wide he can’t jump over it?” We had plenty of real questions that Fat couldn’t field. Our friend Kevin always began his attack one way. “What about my dead cat?” Kevin would ask. Several years ago, Kevin had been out walking his cat in the early evening. Kevin, the fool, had not put the cat on a leash, and the cat had dashed into the street and right into the front wheel of a passing car. When he picked up the remains of the cat it was still alive, breathing in bloody foam and staring at him in horror. Kevin liked to say, “On judgment day when I’m brought up before the great judge I’m going to say, ‘Hold on a second,’ and then I’m going to whip out my dead cat from inside my coat. ‘How do you explain
this
?’ I’m going to ask.” By then, Kevin used to say, the cat would be as stiff as a frying pan; he would hold out the cat by its handle, its tail, and wait for a satisfactory answer.

Fat said, “No answer would satisfy you.”

“No answer you could give,” Kevin sneered. “Okay, so God saved your son’s life; why didn’t he have my cat run out into the street five seconds later?
Three
seconds later? Would that have been too much trouble? Of course, I suppose a cat doesn’t matter.”

“You know, Kevin,” I pointed out one time, “you could have put the cat on a leash.”

“No,” Fat said. “He has a point. It’s been bothering me. For him the cat is a symbol of everything about the universe he doesn’t understand.”

“I understand fine,” Kevin said bitterly. “I just think it’s fucked. God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three. He’s evil, dumb and weak. I think I’ll start my own exegesis.”

“But God doesn’t talk to you,” I said.

“You know who talks to Horse?” Kevin said. “Who really talks to Horse in the middle of the night? People from the planet Stupid. Horse, what’s the wisdom of God called again? Saint what?”

“Hagia Sophia,” Horse said cautiously.

Kevin said, “How do you say Hagia Stupid? St. Stupid?”

“Hagia Moron,” Horse said. He always defended himself by giving in. “Moron is a Greek word like Hagia. I came across it when I was looking up the spelling of oxymoron.”

“Except that the
-on
suffix is the neuter ending,” I said.

That gives you an idea of where our theological arguments tended to wind up. Three malinformed people disagreeing with one another. We also had David our Roman Catholic friend and the girl who had been dying of cancer, Sherri. She had gone into remission and the hospital had discharged her. To some extent her hearing and vision were permanently impaired, but otherwise, she seemed to be fine.

Fat, of course, used this as an argument for God and God’s healing love, as did David and of course Sherri herself. Kevin saw her remission as a miracle of radiation therapy and chemotherapy and luck. Also, he confided to us, the remission was temporary. At any time, Sherri could get sick again. Kevin hinted darkly that the next time she got sick there wouldn’t be a remission. We sometimes thought that he hoped so, since it would confirm his view of the universe.

It was a mainstay of Kevin’s bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment. The universe reeled you out, let you flop and thrash and then reeled you in. Kevin waited constantly for this to begin with him, with me, with David and especially with Sherri. As to Horselover Fat, Kevin believed that the line hadn’t been payed out in years; Fat had long been in the part of the cycle where they reel you back in. He considered Fat not just potentially doomed but doomed in fact.

Fat had the good sense not to discuss Gloria Knudson and her death in front of Kevin. Had he done so, Kevin would add her to his dead cat. He would be talking about whipping her out from under his coat on judgment day, along with the cat.

Being a Catholic, David always traced everything wrong back to man’s free will. This used to annoy even me. I once asked him if Sherri getting cancer consisted of an instance of free will, knowing as I did that David kept up with all the latest news in the field of psychology and would make the mistake of claiming that Sherri had subconsciously wanted to get cancer and so had shut down her immune system, a view floating around in advanced psychological circles at that time. Sure enough, David fell for it and said so.

“Then why did she get well?” I asked. “Did she subconsciously want to get well?”

David looked perplexed. If he consigned her illness to her own mind he was stuck with having to consign her remission to mundane and not supernatural causes. God had nothing to do with it.

“What C. S. Lewis would say,” David began, which at once angered Fat, who was present. It maddened him when David turned to C. S. Lewis to bolster his straight-down-the-pipe orthodoxy.

“Maybe Sherri overrode God,” I said. “God wanted her sick and she fought to get well.” The thrust of David’s impending argument would of course be that Sherri had neurotically gotten cancer due to being fucked up, but God had stepped in and saved her; I had turned it around in anticipation.

“No,” Fat said. “It’s the other way around. Like when he cured me.”

Fortunately, Kevin was not present. He did not consider Fat cured (nor did anyone else) and anyway God didn’t do it. That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-canceling structure. Freud considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. Someone is accused of stealing a horse, to which he replies, “I don’t steal horses and anyhow you have a crummy horse.” If you ponder the reasoning in this you can see the actual thought-process behind it. The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations—brought on by Fat’s supposed encounter with the divine—the two-proposition self-canceling structure would appear like this:

God does not exist.

And anyhow he’s stupid.

A careful study of Kevin’s cynical rantings reveals this structure at every turn. David continually quoted C. S. Lewis; Kevin contradicted himself logically in his zeal to defame God; Fat made obscure references to information fired into his head by a beam of pink light; Sherri, who had suffered dreadfully, wheezed out pious mummeries: I switched my position according to who I was talking to at the time. None of us had a grip on the situation, but we did have a lot of free time to waste in this fashion. By now the epoch of drug-taking had ended, and everyone had begun casting about for a new obsession. For us the new obsession, thanks to Fat, was theology.

A favorite antique quotation of Fat’s goes:

“And can I think the great Jehovah sleeps,
Like Shemosh, and such fabled deities?
Ah! no; heav’n heard my thoughts, and wrote them down—
It must be so.”

Fat doesn’t like to quote the rest of it.

“ ’Tis this that racks my brain,
And pours into my breast a thousand pangs,
That lash me into madness . . .”

It’s from an aria by Handel. Fat and I used to listen to my Seraphim LP of Richard Lewis singing it.
Deeper, and deeper still.

Once I told Fat that another aria on the record described his mind perfectly.

“Which aria?” Fat said guardedly.

“Total eclipse,”
I answered.

“Total eclipse! no sun, no moon,
All dark amidst the blaze of noon!
Oh, glorious light! no cheering ray
To glad my eyes with welcome day!
Why thus deprived Thy prime decree?
Sun, moon and stars are dark to me!”

To which Fat said, “The opposite is true in my case. I am illuminated by holy light fired at me from another world. I see what no other man sees.”

He had a point there.

VINTAGE BOOKS BY PHILIP K. DICK

Clans
of
the
Alphane
Moon

When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they’ll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward.

Science Fiction/0-375-71928-8

Confessions
of
a Crap
Artist

Jack Isidore is a crap artist—a collector of crackpot ideas and worthless objects, a man so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. But seen through Jack’s murderously innocent gaze, Charlie and Judy Hume prove to be just as sealed off from reality.

Science Fiction/0-679-74114-3

The
Cosmic
Puppets

Yielding to a compulsion he can’t explain, Ted Barton interrupts his vacation in order to visit the town of his birth, Millgate, Virginia. But upon entering the sleepy, isolated little hamlet, Ted is distraught to find that the place bears no resemblance to the one he left behind—and never did.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3005-6

Counter-Clock
World

In
Counter-Clock World
, the world has entered the Hobart Phase— a vast sidereal process in which time moves in reverse. As a result, libraries are busy eradicating books, copulation signifies the end of pregnancy, people greet with, “Good-bye,” and part with, “Hello,” and underneath the world’s tombstones, the dead are coming back to life.

Science Fiction/0-375-71933-4

The
Crack
in
Space

A repairman discovers that a hole in a faulty Jifi-scuttler leads to a parallel world. Jim Briskin, campaigning to be the first black president of the United States, thinks alter-Earth is the solution to the chronic overpopulation that has seventy million people cryogenically frozen. But when the other Earth turns out to be inhabited, everything changes.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3006-4

Deus
Irae

With Roger Zelazny

In the years following World War III, a new and powerful faith has arisen from a scorched and poisoned Earth, a faith that embraces the architect of worldwide devastation. The Servants of Wrath have deified Carlton Lufteufel and rechristened him the Deus Irae. Science Fiction/1-4000-3007-2

The
Divine
Invasion

In The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick asks: What if God—or a being called Yah—were alive and in exile on a distant planet? How could a second coming succeed against the high technology and finely tuned rationalized evil of the modern police state?

Science Fiction/0-679-73445-7

Dr.
Bloodmoney

Dr. Bloodmoney
is a post–nuclear holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; and Stuart McConchie and Bonny Keller, two unremarkable people bent on the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil.

Science Fiction/0-375-71929-6

Dr. Futurity

Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now he is caught between his own instincts and a society where it is illegal to save lives.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3009-9

Eye
in
the
Sky

While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry—a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3010-2

Flow
My
Tears,
the
Policeman
Said

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that thirty million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was—a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. Science Fiction/0-679-74066-X

Galactic
Pot-Healer

What could an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other odd creatures it has lured to Plowman’s Planet? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology,
Galactic Pot-Healer
is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.

Science Fiction/0-679-75297-8

The
Game-Players
of
Titan

Poor Pete Garden has just lost Berkeley. He’s also lost his wife, but he’ll get a new one as soon as he rolls a three. It’s all part of the rules of Bluff, the game that’s become a blinding obsession for the last inhabitants of planet Earth. But the rules are about to change— drastically and terminally—because Pete Garden will be playing his next game against an opponent who isn’t even human.

Science Fiction/0-679-74065-1

Lies,
Inc.

A masterwork by Philip K. Dick, this is the final, expanded version of the novella
The Unteleported Man
, which Dick worked on shortly before his death. In
Lies, Inc.
, fans of the science-fiction legend will immediately recognize his hallmark themes of life in a security state, conspiracy, and the blurring of reality and illusion.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3008-0

The
Man
in
the
High
Castle

It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the
I
Ching
is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

Science Fiction/0-679-74067-8

The
Man
Who Japed

A mesmerizing and terrifying tale of a society so eager for order that it will sacrifice anything, including its freedom. Newer York is a post-holocaust city governed by the laws of an oppressively rigid morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom.

Science Fiction/0-375-71935-0

Martian
Time-Slip

On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated “anomalous” children for deportation and destruction, other people—especially Supreme Good-member Arnie Kott of the Water Workers’ Union—suspect that Manfred’s disorder may be a window into the future.

Science Fiction/0-679-76167-5

A Maze of Death

Fourteen strangers came to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that planet whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers found that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O, God is either absent or intent on destroying His creations.

Science Fiction/0-679-75298-6

Now
Wait for
Last
Year

Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time—and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent’s newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest.

Science Fiction/0-679-74220-4

Our
Friends from
Frolix
8

Nick Appleton is a menial laborer. Willis Gram is the despotic oligarch of a planet ruled by big-brained elites. When they both fall in love with Charlotte, Nick seems destined for doom. But everything takes a decidedly unpredictable turn when the revolution’s leader returns from ten years of intergalactic hiding with a ninety-ton protoplasmic slime that is bent on creating a new world order. Science Fiction/0-375-71934-2

The
Penultimate
Truth

The Penultimate Truth
imagines a future in which Americans have been shipped underground, where they toil in crowded industrial anthills and receive a steady diet of inspiring speeches from a president who never seems to age. Nick St. James, like the rest of the masses, believed in the words of his leaders. But that all changes when he travels to the surface.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3011-0

Radio
Free
Albemuth

In his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from
A Scanner Darkly
to
VALIS
and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid.

Science Fiction/0-679-78137-4

A
Scanner
Darkly

Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D—which Arctor takes in massive doses— gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn’t realize he is narcing on himself.

Science Fiction/0-679-73665-4

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
Selected
Literary
and
Philosophical
Writings

Written by Philip K. Dick
Edited by Lawrence Sutin

As Philip K. Dick wrote about androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human? Science Fiction/Literary Criticism & Collections/Essays/0-679-74787-7

The
Simulacra

Set in the middle of the twenty-first century,
The Simulacra
is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the president is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted. In classic fashion, Dick shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

Science Fiction/0-375-71926-1

Solar Lottery

The year is 2203, and the ruler of the Universe is chosen according to the random laws of a strange game under the control of Quizmaster Verrick. But when Ted Bentley, a research technician recently dismissed from his job, signs on to work for Verrick, he has no idea that Leon Cartwright is about to become the new Quizmaster.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3013-7

The
Three
Stigmata
of
Palmer
Eldritch

In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, populated by Godlike—or perhaps Satanic—takeover artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas.

Science Fiction/0-679-73666-2

Time
Out
of Joint

The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise.

Science Fiction/0-375-71927-X

The
Transmigration
of
Timothy
Archer

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes
VALIS
and
The Divine Invasion
, is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress—and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ.

Science Fiction/0-679-73444-9

Ubik

Philip K. Dick’s searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.

Science Fiction/0-679-73664-6

VALIS

VALIS is the first book in Philip K. Dick’s incomparable final trio of novels (the others are
The Divine Invasion
and
The Transmigration
of Timothy Archer
). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser.

Science Fiction/0-679-73446-5

Vulcan’s
Hammer

Objective, unbiased, and hyperrational, the Vulcan 3 should have been the perfect ruler. The omnipotent computer dictates policy that is in the best interests of all citizens—or at least, that is the idea. But when the machine begins to lose control of the “Healer” movement of religious fanatics and the mysterious force behind their rebellion, all hell breaks loose.

Science Fiction/1-4000-3012-9

We
Can
Build
You

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people—ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there’s the added complication that someone—or something—may not want to be sold.