PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A HERETIC
Those days everything had to be new—France had its New Wave in cinema and its nouveau roman; America had its New Frontier. And if something couldn’t be new, then at least it had to have a new name. The men who picked up your garbage were now calling themselves sanitation engineers and your barber was now a hair stylist. Not to be outdone, science fiction tried to become “speculative fiction,” which didn’t actually mean very much, or “new thing,” which meant nothing at all, but at least said it with more panache.
The “new thing” had its most ardent champion in Harlan Ellison, who, by dint of hard work and force of will, had transformed himself from a mere fan into something of an impresario and a master of public relations. Ellison had big plans for science fiction and decided that something needed to be done to celebrate its elevation from a retrograde genre fit only for the likes of army privates and office drones, into the hip redoubt of inventors, iconoclasts, and avant-gardists. His manifesto cum SF anthology Dangerous Vision, the vehicle for his ambition, was going to revolutionize the bourgeois and moribund institution of American letters, which seemed to have spent the socially and intellectually turbulent 1960s on some other planet. Establishment stars—writers like Gore Vidal and Thomas Pynchon—would come knocking on his door, hat in hand, asking to join the ranks of writers like Norman Spinrad and Samuel Delany and other members of Ellison’s literary shock troops.
Ellison’s glorious dream for SF never materialized, yet for that brief moment in history when everything seemed possible (including the notion that stories set in the future would perforce constitute the future of literature), it gave the helots something to live for. Believing that they had won their place in the pantheon, the thirty-two writers whom Ellison assembled into his celebratory volume wrote their short stories the way one might sit for an official portrait intended for posterity. Ellison, as master of ceremonies, wrote a rambling, effusive introduction to each piece, a mixture of hagiography and talk-show hype. And the writers were each asked to append to their contributions an afterword in which they could say whatever they liked—pay homage to their literary forebears if they so chose, display their modesty or vanity—in short, step into the limelight.
Few writers can resist this kind of temptation, and those who do are generally banking on the greater eloquence of silence. Contacted toward the end of 1965 by an enthusiastic Ellison, Phil was thus delighted to learn that if there was one writer whom the anthologist absolutely had to have among his band of dangerous visionaries, it was Phil Dick. Needless to say, he took great pleasure in rendering his self-portrait.
To read the afterword to “Faith of Our Fathers,” Dick’s contribution to the anthology, is to discover a man of happy contradictions: a sociable recluse who likes snuff and hallucinogens and whose tastes in music encompass Heinrich Schütz and the Grateful Dead, a captivating raconteur who holds forth to culture-deprived hippies on the medieval Irish Gnostic John Scotus Erigena, an unregenerate lady’s man blessed with a very young, very shy, and very accommodating wife. The tormented denizen of Point Reyes Station who, under the harsh dictates of Palmer Eldritch and Anne Rubenstein, had thought he had lost his mind was now, on the threshold of his forties, a debonair guru. He took psychedelics, he let it be understood, but only so that he could confirm firsthand his theological theories and those of his glorious predecessors, whom he had begun to quote at every opportunity, transforming even the most modest science fiction novel into a patchwork of epigrams borrowed from Boethius, Master Eckhart, and Saint Bonaventure. He affected to be a veteran acid user in spite of the fact that he had never taken LSD again after that single terrifying experience, and he continued to maintain, as Timothy Leary had, that to follow a religious life in the twentieth century without LSD was like studying astronomy with the naked eye. He loved to tell people how Leary had phoned him one day from John Lennon’s hotel room in Canada while the Beatles were on their North American tour. That’s right, Phil said solemnly, delighting in the incredulous, fascinated reaction this tidbit always provoked from his listeners—Leary had called from John Lennon’s hotel room. He and Lennon had just finished reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and couldn’t contain their enthusiasm. That’s it! That’s it exactly! the stoned Lennon had managed to wheeze, after dragging himself across the floor to get to the phone. He was already talking about making the novel into a film, the psychedelic film of all time, the visual corollary to the album he was then recording. Caught off guard, Phil hadn’t had the time to think up one of his tests to verify that he really was speaking to Leary and Lennon and not a couple of jokers pretending to be them. But when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out the following year, he recognized the title, as well as the paean to lysergic acid—“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—that Lennon had talked about.
This episode left Phil with an aggravated tendency to name-drop, along with the idea that he exerted a special kind of influence—an underground, almost occult power. And as a matter of fact, the adjective Phildickian—a term used to describe strange situations or a twisted yet accurate perspective on the world—was becoming a counterculture shibboleth, at least in some circles, as his reputation spread beyond the small world of science fiction devotees. In their crudely printed magazines, underground writers and artists like rock critic Paul Williams and cartoonists Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman spoke of Dick as one of the great unsung geniuses of the day.
The new role suited him. For one thing, it put some distance between him and his dangerous and terrifying religious obsessions; now these were simply his professional trademark, a part of his legend. God was, as they used to say, his thing. No one challenged him on what all agreed was his exclusive territory or reproached him for venturing into it, provided that he did so as a saboteur, a bomb thrower, a shatterer of traditions. He preferred not to recall the miserable weeks he spent writing The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or the abject terror he experienced when his acid trip hurled him back down into the dark, pitiless world of that novel; yet when people spoke of it as his “black mass” and compared it to Scriabin’s work of that title, the chilling Piano Sonata no. 9 in F Major, he loved the flattery. He also loved being told that had he lived several centuries earlier the Inquisition would have burned him at the stake ten times over. He had recently discovered Borges, who, along with Tolkien and M. C. Escher, was riding the crest of worldwide acclaim. Phil greatly admired Borges’s slick and mischievous dilettantism, the way he treated theology as a branch of fantastic literature, a seductive and ultimately inconsequential intellectual game. Phil tried to come up with Borgesian paradoxes of his own (America, he liked to say, harbors two superstitions—that God doesn’t exist and that there’s actually a difference between different brands of cigarettes) and imitate Borges’s tongue-in-cheek casuistry. He even went so far as to undertake—along with Roger Zelazny, a fellow science fiction writer—an elaborate religious fantasy, Deus Irae, which they took ten years to complete, only to realize that what they had come up with made absolutely no sense at all.
Phil was not quite the detached intellectual that he would have liked to appear, however; the literary heretic was also a conscience-ridden parishioner who quaked at the idea of hell, of which his acid trip, he felt, had merely been a preview. If someone spoke of the biblical Apocalypse as allegory, not to be taken literally any more than, say, the Creation stories of the Book of Genesis, he would shake his head in rueful dismay, like a man whose fate it was To Know the Truth while his fellow men consoled themselves with false hopes and comforting illusions. Phil wanted to love God but he feared the devil even more. People forgave him his gothic religiosity, regarding it as an amusing provocation, one more example of his legendary deviancy. And in Phil’s vaguely Buddhistic/agnostic milieu it was easy to be deviant. You didn’t have to profess adherence to Pelagianism or Albigensianism; all you had to do was let people know you were a practicing Christian. It took Nancy some time to understand, back before his marriage to Anne had been annulled, that Phil wasn’t joking when he told her how troubled he was that they were living together in sin, which meant that he couldn’t take Holy Communion. More than his eventual divorce, he felt, this exclusion from the rite of the Eucharist—his sole protection in the battle for his soul being waged within him and all around him—was his punishment for the sacrilege he had committed in parodying the rite of communion in his “black mass.” His nostalgia for the sacramental life led him to come up with various substitutes, none of them odder than the “empathy box,” the device around which the major subplot of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? revolves.
* * *
The empathy box is the principal ritual instrument in the quasi-religious cult to which Rick Deckard belongs, along with almost everyone else in the year 2021. Like a small television set with a pair of handles on its sides, which the viewer grasps while looking into the screen, the empathy box allows the follower of a cult called Mercerism to witness the constantly repeated scene of an old man, about whom we know nothing except that his name is Mercer, climbing painfully up the side of a mountain, pelted with rocks as he makes his slow and arduous ascent. To practice Mercerism is not merely to watch this scene unfold but to participate in it: it is your feet that drag their way up the gravel-strewn mountainside, your flesh that bruises under the hail of stones, your soul that bears a crushing sadness while you remain, inexplicably, joyful. You become one with Mercer and with all the others who at the same moment, on Earth and on the colonized planets, are also grasping the handles of their boxes. You sense their presence as they, too, suffer and exult. You incorporate all the others into yourself. The fusion with Mercer—a combination of a Via Dolorosa and a communion of saints—is the diametrical opposite of the “translation” that Palmer Eldritch inflicts on those who take the drug Chew-Z. Fusion with Mercer does not isolate but unifies; it does not damn but redeems. And it is constantly renewed. On reaching the summit of the mountain, Mercer falls to the ground in the throes of death; carried to the tomb, he then rises again. “Inevitably,” marvels one character. “And us with him. So we’re eternal, too.”
Toward the end of the novel, the truth of Mercerism is challenged when Buster Friendly, a talk-show host who seems to appear live on television more hours a day than there are in a week, airs an exposé claiming that Mercerism is fraud, an opiate for the masses, perhaps fabricated by the government itself Friendly has pictures and testimony proving that the scene on the mountain was shot in a studio; Mercerism is just another television show. As for Mercer himself, people used to wonder whether he was a man or a universal archetype put on Earth by some inscrutable cosmic dictate. Buster Friendly reveals him to be a mere Hollywood bit actor fallen on hard times—little more than a skid row alcoholic. The man happened to stumble into the role of a lifetime. All he had to do was get bombarded by stones made of rubber while ketchup ran down his face. The only drawback was that he had to lay off the booze during filming.
Buster Friendly’s revelations would seem to spell ruin for humanity’s religious hopes and dreams. And yet … they don’t. In a truly magnificent scene, Dick’s version of the walk to Emmaus, Mercer appears before one of his followers and calmly explains that everything Buster Friendly has said is true—everything, even the business about the drinking. Yet that doesn’t change a thing, he says. Not a thing. “Because you’re still here and I’m still here.”
* * *
With this affirmation of blind faith in the face of all evidence, Dick staked his position in a debate that was roiling public opinion, or at least the segment of it that cared about matters of religious belief. The discovery in 1947 of the Dead Sea Scrolls had given rise to the scandalous notion that, if a sizable portion of the teachings attributed by the synoptic Gospels to Jesus could also be found in documents antedating his birth, those teachings might not be as original as previously thought and Jesus himself might be merely one of those garden-variety itinerant preachers Palestine was teeming with back in those days. Jesus, in other words, might well have been a fake. Nonbelievers who followed the debate believed the Dead Sea Scrolls offered a strong argument against Christianity. The clergy, naturally, were deeply distressed. Some among them came to question their faith, including James A. Pike, the Episcopal bishop of California.
An erstwhile lawyer and a gifted speaker, Pike was an important public figure, an exemplar of the progressive prelate. He had fought for civil rights, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and was a friend of the Kennedy clan. He oversaw the introduction of rock ’n’ roll into the mass and presided over the completion of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, on whose stained glass windows parishioners could behold not just the usual panoply of saints but also the realistic likenesses of Albert Einstein, Thurgood Marshall, and John Glenn. Pike had appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek magazines and had his own nationally syndicated weekly television show. The height of his ecclesiastical chic came when he was tried for heresy: he had made audacious claims—which he audaciously defended—about the existence of the Holy Spirit, who in his opinion had vanished from circulation around the time of the apostles.
Maren Hackett had met Pike in the fall of 1965, when she was head of a Bay Area feminist organization, and they became lovers. Not long after, Nancy and Phil were invited to dinner at the apartment where Hackett and Pike carried on their relationship in secret—at the time, the bishop was still married, though separated. Phil did not look forward to the dinner; he didn’t like venturing onto unfamiliar turf and Pike’s fame intimidated him. But by the end of the evening he was rolling on the floor, laughing, babbling, completely swept up in the good vibrations emanating from his mother-in-law’s lover. Jim and Phil—they were on a first-name basis from that day on—began a conversation that would last for three years. Both unregenerate intellectuals, they loved controversy and trading volleys of learned citations. Like a couple of medieval realists, they believed that words were things and that any idea to which one could give verbal form must necessarily have a correspondent in reality. Deeply respectful of the printed word and deaf to the notion that books often contradicted one another, they had a tendency to give credence to whatever they happened to be reading and a talent for persuading others to share their beliefs. And as they were voracious readers, their beliefs often changed. Other people found their inconstancy irritating, but it seemed perfectly natural to them.
During their verbal jousts, Jim brought to bear the authority of someone accustomed to the pulpit and to public debate and a theological arsenal that was both more complete than Phil’s and better organized. But Phil, ever the Rat, did more than hold his own: Jim was impressed by the traps set by this obscure writer who dressed like a bum and could probably run circles around the entire Council of Bishops. Since they were both fond of contradiction and neither could stand it when they happened to agree about something, they egged each other on in their heresies. In the end, this compulsion for heterodoxy would be of less consequence for Phil than for the bishop, who was actually the more fervent of the two, though the subtler in his thinking.
Pike’s obsession at the time was eschatology, particularly the great foment in this branch of theological thinking that the Middle East had seen at the dawn of our era, and he gave Phil what amounted to a course of study in Gnosticism. The Western world, it seems, had come within a hair’s breadth of turning out Gnostic rather than Christian, and, to hear Pike tell it, the result was regrettable, as far as knowing the truth was concerned. He gave passionate accounts of the tormented absolutist doctrines that Christian orthodoxy had so successfully managed to silence that many of them are known to us solely through the hostile commentaries of Saint Jerome. Christianity was a religion of dissent to begin with, and the Gnostics were the dissidents within this dissent—the noble losers, the ultimate Punks, a source of perennial fascination to freethinking theologians. How could Phil not fall in love with spiritual masters whose teachings derived from the intuition that something was not right in the world? To them this world was both a prison and an illusion, some demiurge’s idea of a cruel joke. Only those who comprehended these dark truths and struggled to remain awake and aware in the face of illusion had any chance of emerging from the shadows in which the demiurge holds us captive and of attaining the true and divine light. Phil realized that he had been a Gnostic all his life without knowing it. He understood Gnosticism as only someone who has inhabited the tomb-world can, yet he also wanted to believe there was a remedy. And that remedy, he thought, the path toward truth and life, could be none other than Jesus Christ.
At this point in the debate, the bishop must have felt like a father who has to explain to his child that there is no Santa Claus. He and Maren had been going to London every two or three months to meet with John Allegro, one of the two British delegates to the international team that had been put together to study and publish the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pike returned from these trips both troubled and exhilarated, a bearer of scandalous truths. According to the latest revelations, he reported with tremulous delight, the Gospels were a fraud and Jesus merely an epigone of an Essenian sect around whom a bunch of clever Jews had managed to construct a colossal scam.
Confronted with these revelations—“scientific discoveries,” the bishop assured him—Phil found himself in the position of defender of the faith, a role that both satisfied his love of paradox and accorded with his deepest hopes and beliefs. He responded to his friend’s assaults as Mercer himself might have done: even if what Pike was saying was true, he told him, it didn’t change a thing. Pike reminded him of the English professor who argues that Hamlet wasn’t really written by William Shakespeare but by someone named Shakespeare. Did that make Hamlet any less profound a work of literature? By the same token, Phil explained, if you believe that Christ is the Son of God, that he was resurrected and had defeated death, and then someone comes along and proves to you that he was actually some ecclesiastical subaltern who may not even have existed in the first place, well, did that make the Gospels any less true, metaphysically speaking? Pike was right to seek out the truth, Phil told him, but he should have known that Christ was the truth. Otherwise, all Pike was saying was that he didn’t believe in Christ—in other words, that he’d learned nothing.
And indeed, the bishop had to admit that he was no longer sure he believed in the religion he had taken a vow to serve. And this troubled him.
* * *
The high point of this period in Phil’s life came on mushroom day. Pike had just returned from London with “top secret” news that the Dominicans at the Jerusalem Bible School were hoping to suppress and that even the usually outspoken Allegro was afraid of making public. The members of the sect whose teachings Jesus, or his inventors, had merely popularized had apparently been in the practice of cultivating a certain kind of mushroom in their caves above the Dead Sea and from it had made a kind of bread as well as a broth, which they ate and drank together. Here were the true origins of the Eucharist. But the real bombshell was the news that the mushroom in question was Amanita muscaria—a hallucinogen that was the object of a fertility cult stretching way back into antiquity and that was being still used by some Siberian tribes (whose numbers it had helped decimate). Christianity was merely another instance of this cult, and a latecomer at that: the New Testament, which served as a cover for the cult’s teachings, designed to placate the civil and religious authorities of the day, was, in effect, a cryptogamic cryptogram.
The bishop complained that from now on when he conducted Holy Communion, it would be with the knowledge that Christianity had been about tripping on psychedelics.
And that Jesus, interrupted Phil, before bursting into laughter, was a drug trafficker. Then he added more soberly that this was something he had long suspected. Yet it didn’t diminish in the least his faith in Him.
* * *
In February 1966, Pike’s twenty-year-old son killed himself with a hunting rifle. There were lots of theories as to why—that he felt overshadowed by his father, or was in love with his father’s mistress, or had discovered he was gay, or had had a bad acid trip.
Phil wrote Pike a letter of condolence:
I have a feeling that in the instant after death everything real will become apparent; all the cards will be turned face-up, the game will be over, and we will see clearly what we have suspected only … and unfounded suspicions will be erased.… Now it is a mystery to me, a black glass.… Behold, Paul says. I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep. Or something like that. I believe that; in fact it is virtually all I believe. But even that, unproved, will have to wait for its test, like everything else. But even if I’m wrong and Lucretius is right, I’ll be content; I’ll have no choice.
But the bishop couldn’t wait until the instant after death to discover what was on the other side of those cards and he no longer had confidence in Saint Paul; he needed to find out now, and for himself. Consumed with guilt and ready to do anything to assuage it, he and Maren sought out assorted psychics and spiritualists and, the summer after Jim Junior’s death, started telling people that the young man had come back. He had spoken to them and forgiven them, they said, their eyes shining with newfound joy; he wanted them to be happy. Pike, to whom nothing happened that either hadn’t come from a book or wouldn’t end up in a book, even contracted to write about his experiences with the Other Side. He continued to question the validity of Christianity. Validity was the word he used, but Phil found it absurd—it was flabby and fashionable and hardly reflected the battle being fought within his friend’s heart. The bishop was counting on Jim Junior to put an end to his doubts, to tell him, with all the authority of a denizen of the Other Side, whether Jesus was merely a preacher hawking the crazy ideas of a band of Middle Eastern dopeheads or truly the Son of God. The whole thing was insanity, Phil told him. It was lunacy to use his son’s death the way one might consult a reference work to settle a question of historical fact. But Phil also knew that under the same conditions he would do exactly as Pike was doing, that all his life he, too, had been looking for the Ultimate Reference, and that Pike’s quest had nothing to do with historical truth. It was about having faith or losing it—in other words, it was a matter of life and death. For the bishop, losing Christ meant losing everything, this despite the fact that he was already talking, like a business executive coolly weighing the advantages of changing jobs, about leaving the clergy and going into what he called the “private sector.”
Pike persuaded Phil and Nancy to join him in a séance with a medium in Santa Barbara whom someone had recommended to him. After some hesitation, Phil agreed to attend and even to take notes that Pike could use for his book. He found it painful to see so brilliant a mind succumb to ideas that were patently silly. Bad money chases out good, he thought: the bishop believed in his son’s posthumous manifestations as devoutly as the disciples—or Phil himself—believed in the resurrection of Christ. Who was he to declare Pike’s beliefs unfounded or to brush off similar judgments with regard to his own?
Mediums, seers, and parapsychologists in general rely on intuition, cues unconsciously provided by their clients, bits of public information that can sound like revelations when cleverly presented, and of course a good measure of bluff. When they’re wrong, they finesse it; when they hit the mark, they’ve won. Still, anyone who has ever consulted a medium knows that even after one has sifted through all the plausible explanations for his or her clairvoyance, there always remains a residue for which there is no explanation—some small detail, not by itself very significant, that leaves one wondering how the medium knew about it or even managed to deduce it. It’s the sort of thing that troubles one but that one then forgets about. That day, through the intervention of the medium, the shade of Jim Junior made reference to a private joke between Phil and Nancy about the owner of a restaurant in Berkeley whom they suspected of being a KGB agent. For weeks afterward, Phil, trying to rationalize how a medium from Santa Barbara could know about a private joke between a couple from San Rafael, figured that maybe the restaurant owner really was a KGB agent—and that the medium was too. Then he forgot all about it. Pike and Maren hadn’t even noticed the detail, moved as they were by hearing the spirit of Jim Junior tell them again that he forgave them and wanted them to be happy. But, alas, on the subject of the “validity” of Christianity, the spirit kept silent.
Several weeks later, Maren Hackett, who was suffering from cancer and was worried that Pike was going to leave her, committed suicide, taking a deadly cocktail of Seconal, Amytal, and Dexamyl—pills that she and Pike and Phil were well acquainted with. Phil thought about all the times he had quietly helped himself to some in Jim and Maren’s medicine cabinet.
From the beginning of Phil’s relationship with Maren, she had been the rock, the embodiment of the strength and hope that Christian virtues can impart to those who practice them. With her death, he wondered whether the wheel had turned once more, whether the favorable cycle had finished and the moment of happiness that he and those around him had so briefly known had come to an end. Darkness was spreading across the passionately carefree sixties. Ever since LSD had become illegal, one heard more and more about bad trips; it was as though Palmer Eldritch himself, taking advantage of the drug’s illegality, had set up shop at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the cradle of hippie culture. The locals marched in the streets, through Golden Gate Park, beating on drums and intoning the ancient sound of “Om” in the hopes of chasing away the bad vibes. All in vain. People were dying now from bad drugs. It was rumored that the Mafia had taken over the drug trade and was peddling all kinds of adulterated wares. People tried to pretend that nothing was happening, but Phil could not. He knew that the worm was in the apple.
* * *
His own world, however, had never seemed so stable. Now forty years old, he was heavier, wiser, and more circumspect than ever before. The storms seemed to have receded. The woman he loved was carrying his child. They had moved into a larger house. He was beginning to become known; foreign editions of his works were starting to appear. With the royalties, he bought himself an extravagant gift, the kind of thing that a man who has finally settled down might dream of owning: an enormous lockable, fireproof metal file cabinet into which he could put all the treasures he had been dragging around with him since he and his mother had parted ways: manuscripts, letters, valuable LPs, stamp and comic book collections, and rare issues of science fiction magazines.
The day this monster was delivered—it weighed seven hundred pounds without the drawers and took up an entire wall of his study—Phil felt a twinge of anxiety amid his delight. He knew that once you’ve bought something like this you never move again, you’ve dropped anchor. Then he remembered Wagner’s Siegfried, how Fafner the dragon has to die and lose his hoarded gold, and he found himself consumed with the opposite anxiety, not of acquiring too much but of losing it all. While trying to help the deliverymen with the safe he managed to give himself a hernia, which he interpreted as a sign of divine rebuke. Don’t amass wealth, God was telling him. Everything you believe you own will be taken from you.
The I Ching had a similarly ominous message for him. Ming I, it said: the “darkening of the light.”
* * *
It was at this moment that Ellison’s anthology finally appeared. In the small world of science fiction, nobody talked about anything else. Ellison’s hyperbolic introduction, which presented Dick as a dope-smoking genius who wrote his masterpieces while on acid, made him smile, but he had to admit he’d been more than complicit in fostering this myth. Then, acting on an impulse that no writer can resist, Phil reread “Faith of Our Fathers,” the story he had contributed.
Set in a totalitarian world inspired by the works of Orwell and Hannah Arendt and by events of recent history, it was one of those Phil Dick specialties. In this world, televisions are equipped with cameras to make sure that people are watching, to allow the authorities to monitor each viewer’s attentiveness and susceptibility to indoctrination by the Leader, whose august visage appears daily on the little screen in every living room—just the sort of technology the Nielsen ratings people would have loved to have. Then comes the day when someone, having ingested an illegal substance, sees not the face of the Absolute Benefactor of the People but something else, something horrible—a many-legged nightmare, an avatar of Palmer Eldritch. The man tells himself that what he’s seeing must be a hallucination, but he also wonders, Phildickian hero that he is, if his hallucination isn’t more real than reality itself. What happens subsequently confirms his suspicion. Having entered into contact with a resistance network, he learns that the drug responsible for his vision is not a hallucinogen but an antihallucinogen. The real hallucinogen is what everyone is taking without realizing it, for it is in the tap water. Under its influence people see the Leader with his handsome features, exuding peace and harmony. Only those who take the antidote, the lucidogen, as it were, see the Leader for what he is—protean in his hideousness, always monstrous in some new and different way. Eventually, the hero meets the Leader face-to-face and realizes that he is God, cruel and capricious, dangerous and terrible. And on that note of disturbing ambiguity the story ends.
“Faith of Our Fathers” is a horrific tale. While writing it, Phil felt a surge of pride. Reading it a year later, after the deaths of Jim Pike Jr. and Maren, he saw it differently. It was still horrific, but in a new and even more distressing way. All his tricks and hobbyhorses were on display: totalitarianism, the idios kosmos and the koinos kosmos, psychedelic drugs, Ultimate Reality, God. Here was the little world of Philip K. Dick in one neat package. All that was missing were the androids, the simulacra—and for good reason: the story was itself a simulacrum. Had some talented forger wanted to write “in the manner of Dick” or had some computer programmer come up with a software program capable of churning out Dick, the result would have been a story like this one.
Yet he, and not some computer, had written it. And he was real, authentic: Phil Dick and not an android that had taken his place, unbeknownst to everyone. Of that he was sure.
Yet he was also sure that were he an android he would come to the very same conclusion. That was exactly how androids thought. And he knew that the android, having thought that thought, would be struck with fear, if only because that is how he had been programmed.
None of this proved anything one way or the other, except that he, too, Philip K. Dick—or whoever he was—was afraid.